


Sink or Swim

by Alice_h



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Drug Gang, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Catra (She-Ra) has BPD, Catra Goes to Therapy (She-Ra), Catra has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (She-Ra), Drug Addiction, Drugs, F/F, FYI Adora doesn't come into her life until near the end, Heavy Angst, I always wanted to use that tag, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, My other fic has them together in the future from this, Netossa is a therapist, Original Character Death(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Abuse, Prison, Recovery, Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner (She-Ra)'s A+ Parenting, Therapy Cat Melog (She-Ra), eventual catradora - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:00:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 13
Words: 49,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28050555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alice_h/pseuds/Alice_h
Summary: On her 18th birthday, Catra leaves her abusive foster home to live with Lonnie, an older girl who is part of the Horde drug gang. With big dreams of success, wealth and love, Catra throws herself into her new life of drug dealing, but soon finds out that it's not the perfect world she imagined it to be.After suffering at the hands of Mr Prime, a friend of the gang leader, she heads into a downward spiral of addiction that ends up costing her everyone she cares about. Can Catra fight her way to recovery?This is a prequel to my series A Place of Our Own, but you don't need to have read that first (though I don't mind if you do!)Usually updates every Thursday
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Catra/Lonnie (She-ra)
Comments: 59
Kudos: 45





	1. Freedom

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really enjoying being back in this universe, and I've already written a lot of the story... you have a wild ride ahead!
> 
> A quick note: The overall storyline that happens here was conceived as part of the main series, before Season 4 aired, and back when Lonnie was still very antagonistic to Catra and Hordak was a terrifying, evil leader and not a total dork. This means their characters here are largely based on that (but we're not sticking too rigidly to canon).
> 
> As is usual for me, this story goes to some dark places, but there are warnings in the notes for each chapter. This first one isn't too bad, but there are references to abuse. Also both Catra and Lonnie swear a lot.

My 18th birthday was the first one in my life I ever remember looking forward to. Mrs Weaver, the evil woman who ran the foster home I grew up in, never bothered to celebrate anyone’s birthday, and god forbid you even mention it around her. Previous birthdays had been sad at best – I knew that other kids got parties and presents, and that people made a fuss of them, but I got none of that. All I got was shouted at and sometimes beaten for even daring to say the word ‘birthday’. The worst was my thirteenth, when the kids in my class at school got me a little jewellery box and filled it with little bits of paper on which they’d written what they liked about me. They all knew how crappy my life was, knew I was depressed and had fuck all self-esteem, and they genuinely wanted to make it better for me, it was incredible… I’d never known that sort of kindness. But my happiness was short-lived; Mrs Weaver got so angry about me having any sort of gift, and when she saw it that evening that she threw it and smashed it, then came at me, pinning me against the wall by my throat until I passed out. I had to wear a shirt with a collar on it at school for a week to hide her finger marks.

So yeah, birthdays in my foster home were nothing to get excited about. But turning eighteen, that was something I couldn’t wait for – that was the age at which I could, with permission, start to live away from the home. I didn’t have that permission, and I probably wouldn’t have the slightest hope of getting her to agree, but if I could escape before she knew what was happening, then I’d have the upper hand. Once I was out of the hell that was her home, she wouldn’t be able to intimidate me into staying, and if she wanted me back, she would have to find me first and then call the cops on me. And I’m fairly sure she wouldn’t have liked the attention that would bring.

I had to be incredibly careful with my preparations. I’d heard stories – apparently another kid tried to leave on his eighteenth, just like I was doing, and Mrs Weaver had barged into this boy’s room the night before to find him packing a suitcase. I only got this third-hand from another kid when I was about 12, so it could have been completely made up, but supposedly she threw him down the stairs and almost killed him, and I can absolutely believe she’d do that. Not wanting to suffer a similar fate, I did nothing until the early hours of my birthday when everyone else was asleep. Packing everything you own into a couple of battered holdalls and a stupid backpack with an anime logo on when you’re terrified of making any noise lest you wake up the child abuser sleeping two doors down is not an experience that I would recommend to anyone. I was scared shitless the entire time.

At least I knew where I was going. There was this older girl who lived on the estate nearby, Lonnie, and she was an absolute saviour, at least to me. I had no doubt she wasn’t entirely an angel – she sold drugs for some gang, but that meant she had enough money to get her own place, and when I mentioned that I wanted to move out, she offered right away for me to stay with her. I was going to pay my way by doing some work for her – running drugs, I imagined, but doing something like that really didn’t give me any problems. I wasn’t exactly a ‘good girl’, I’d mostly bunked off school for the last couple of years, and my Saturday afternoon entertainment was walking up to the motorway bridge with Lonnie and chucking stones at cars. Selling a couple of illicit substances to people definitely wasn’t going to keep me up at night.

I left before Weaver got up, I think it must have been about 5am. The world at that time was weird; the sun hadn’t yet risen, although the light peeking over the horizon gave the sky a slight glow, and the streets I walked along were practically deserted. Occasionally a car would pass, some early riser off to work or something, and I passed a couple of dog walkers. It was eerily peaceful, but it was nice – in a way it served to underscore my new-found freedom, this new world of peace and safety. I had done it, I had survived almost two decades of abuse, and now the world would find out who Catra really was. Who I _could_ be now I was in an environment that welcomed me and would let me spread my wings.

Lonnie’s place seemed so much further away when I was carrying my entire life with me. The few times I’d been there before, it took about 15 minutes to walk there from what I guess had now become my former home. I’m certain that it took at least twice that this time, not that I really minded; it was amazing just being able to walk through the streets knowing that I never had to go back to that… I rarely use this word, but I can’t think of any better description – that _cunt_ of a foster carer. Every tiny corner of my life before now had been miserable, but at last I had a future. And she wouldn’t be part of it.

Although I’d sent Lonnie a text the night before to warn her that I’d be arriving pretty early, I don’t think she remembered, judging by the six times I had to press the buzzer for her apartment before I received a groggy “Yeah?” through the speaker. Clearly, I’d woken her up, but what else could I have done? I wasn’t going to spend a couple of hours walking around carrying two heavy bags while I waited for her to have a nap – I could handle myself in a fight, sure, but this estate was not the nicest place in town. And when I say ‘not the nicest’, I mean ‘they found a dead body in the kid’s playground the other day’ level of shittiness. That kind of area.

Her apartment was on the second floor of this godawful 70s council block, the sort of place that had been built on the cheap and had seen little maintenance since then beyond painting over graffiti, and it seemed they’d even given up on that years ago. The only two fluorescent lights that still worked flickered like strobe lights, and the main front door was more boarded-up holes than door by now. I guess people really liked kicking the shit out of it. It was hardly the place one dreams of as a first home, but I’d learnt the hard way that dreams were not something worth having.

“Fuck, Catra… it’s, like, 6am,” Lonnie was half-asleep leaning on the doorway as I climbed the final few stairs. Given the mismatched combination of bra and rather revealing panties, she was either extremely unashamed about her body or lacking in the consciousness needed to take any action to protect her modesty. My guess was the latter.

I felt a little bad for having forced her out of bed at this time, but it wasn’t like I had much choice, “I did tell you I had to get out of there early. If Mrs Weaver caught me…”

“She’d beat the living shit out of you, yeah.”

“Exactly.”

Eyes still shut, as though trying to hold onto sleep for as long as possible, Lonnie shuffled off to the side to make room for me, “Come in. Sorry it’s a mess.”

Though I didn’t have the luxury of judgement, I was still slightly taken aback by how much of an understatement that was. I’d been here a couple of times before, but it had never looked this bad – I guess she must have put in the effort for me on those occasions. The bare-floored hallway I stepped through had a sporadic carpet of unopened letters strewn across it, some acting as a mat for several pairs of shoes that had seen better days. I dumped my bags onto the floor next to them, giving a relieved sigh now the weight was no longer pressing on my shoulders, and continued through the apartment. The living room was in even more of a state than the hall, the bare windows sending a shaft of early dawn sunlight onto a dining table piled high with unironed clothes and myriad wires attached to bits of home appliances in various states of disrepair. In the centre of the room, a ratty blue sofa was covered in empty beer bottles and ashtrays, and this had seemingly been enough to convince a blonde-haired houseguest to sleep on the floor next to it instead.

“Just kick him out the way,” Lonnie explained, doing exactly that to the comatose man who stirred slightly but remained fast asleep, “Move, Kyle, ya fuckin’ weapon.”

So this was the famous Kyle. Lonnie had often talked about him, though I’d yet to meet him, and he seemed like a bit of a scapegoat for her little circle of friends. From the stories I’d heard, he was always the one who ended up the butt of jokes, the one who they forced out to get shopping at all hours of the night or pick up the tab at the bar, but there was clearly something about him that made him worth having around. I assumed he was part of the gang too, so maybe she didn’t have a choice, but from what I could gather of the snippets she’d told me about him, he often stayed here with her.

Lonnie must have caught me staring a little too long, “You wanna fuck him or something? Trust me, it ain’t nothing special but it’s a dick… still better than getting yourself off. Probably wanna wait ‘til he’s sober though, the beer really gets to him. It’s like a fucking marshmallow.”

“Oh, no, no…” I spluttered nervously, trying to purge that image from my mind and starting to wonder exactly what sort of relationship these two really had, “I… uh, I’m gay anyway.”

“Nice…” she drawled, running a hand down my back somewhat suggestively before clapping her hands together and becoming rather more forcefully cheerful than she had been a few minutes before, “Right, I’m gonna make coffee. Fuck knows I need some caffeine if I’m gonna be up at this time of the morning. Make yourself at home, Catra.”

With Lonnie off in the kitchen, having found a dressing gown to wrap herself in from a hanger on the back of a door, I had a couple of minutes of peace to collect my thoughts. It had only just started to dawn on me what a major turning point in my life this day had already been for me. I didn’t have to live in fear anymore, I didn’t have to be so guarded every moment I was here, and it was such an unknown feeling that I couldn’t put any words to it – was this what safety felt like? In the foster home, my mind was always surveying every inch around me, always second-guessing my actions based on how Mrs Weaver would see them. I knew how she thought by now, she was obsessed with what people would think of her based on what I did – that was largely down to her not wanting me to do or say anything that might alert people to take a closer look at the way she ran the home. But at Lonnie’s, my new home, I didn’t have to worry about that. I could do whatever I wanted, and she wouldn’t thunder into my bedroom armed with whatever her weapon of the day was. I was overwhelmed with freedom.

Wait, that was a point. Where was my bedroom? It was a tiny flat and I could only see three doors off the main hallway. There was the sofa, but it seemed like Kyle had more of a claim to that than I did. I poked my head around the kitchen doorway where Lonnie was pouring out two mugs of coffee in the small gap she’d cleared amongst the dirty mugs and used teabags on the worktop, “Hey, uh, where am I sleeping?”

I silently cursed myself for not asking what should have been a really obvious question the moment Lonnie offered me a place to stay, nor at any point in the few weeks since she had suggested it. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t want to hear anything that might put me off staying, maybe I was just so intoxicated by the idea of being free – whatever it was, it was rather too late to start worrying about it. Rather unsurprisingly, I heard Mrs Weaver’s voice in my brain start berating me: _You never think, do you, Catra? You are a useless little girl, I’ve half a mind to lock you in your room so you can’t inconvenience anyone else._ I guess it would be quite a while before she got out of my head for good.

“I was gonna say in with me,” Lonnie casually stirred the mugs, reaching into the fridge beside her and pulling out a plastic bottle of milk. She glanced at the label, then at her watch, before deciding to give it a sniff test before using it. From the look on her face, it was clearly on the unusable side, and she silently put the cap back on before throwing it carefully into the near-overflowing bin in the corner, “Fuck, ugh. Hope you don’t mind it black.”

“Yeah, black’s fine.”

Lonnie handed me one of the coffees and led me back into the living room, where Kyle’s snoring had increased in volume from barely audible to a level not dissimilar to a truck engine. She gave him a rather painful-looking kick, which seemed to be pretty effective in quietening him down again, and cleared a space on the sofa for us both, a couple of beer bottles clanking onto the floor, “I mean, I don’t really have a lot of space, but it’s just for a bit right? Kyle usually takes the sofa, so my bed’s really all that’s left.”

It wasn’t quite what I had expected, but what choice did I have? If I didn’t sleep here, I’d be out on the streets because no fucking way was I ever setting foot under that woman’s roof again. Besides, I wasn’t exactly too disappointed to be sharing a bed with someone like Lonnie now I was an adult - something wonderful could come from that.

“Relax, Catra,” she must have seen the concern in my expression, despite my best attempts at hiding it, “I’m not gonna try anything weird, you’re barely legal. Fuck, give me some credit, we’re just gonna top and tail.”

I shook my head, “No, no, it’s fine. I just… I didn’t really think about what the arrangements would be and it’s… it’s fine.”

“Oh my God, shit,” Lonnie’s hand flew up to cover her gaping mouth, “She didn’t…she didn’t touch you, did she? Is that why you’re worried? I… it’s okay, I’ll figure something out, I had no-”

“God, no! Weaver might have been human trash who broke my arm a couple of times and beat me most weeks, but she wasn’t a nonce. I’d have probably gotten her arrested a long time ago if she tried anything like that.”

It felt strange defending that woman, but I had an odd sense of responsibility in doing so, and I hated it. Why should I say anything nice about her when she never had anything nice to say about me? I could have told Lonnie anything, come up with some really nasty shit and she would have deserved every single thing I said, even if it was a lie. Maybe that was it, though; maybe the things she did were horrifying enough without needing to make anything up. Not that Lonnie probably cared, and nor did I really want to spend my first hour in my new home pouring my heart out to a drug dealer about my abusive childhood. She already knew enough about it anyway.

“That’s something, I guess,” she responded with the tone of someone who was already finding the conversation really fucking awkward and had no idea what to say. I’m sure she’d heard it all before anyway. I rarely got to talk about what my life in that foster home was like; I knew that if I confided in anyone about what Mrs Weaver was doing, they would call social services and she would flat up deny it and claim I was making things up to deliberately hurt her. After all, Catra is the naughty kid, Catra has _problems_ , Catra would say any old thing for attention, Catra has always hated me when I’ve done nothing but give her kindness. All that bullshit. And once the social workers had stopped sniffing around, once they’d had their ‘private’ conversation with me that she always made sure we knew she was listening in on, that was when she’d come for me. That was when she would punish me for ‘lying’ about her. So I had learned never to say anything about her to anyone who might make the misguided decision to ‘help’ me.

Lonnie was different though. It wasn’t that she didn’t care, I knew she did – that was why she was doing this – but she had a similar view of the authorities to me: they only existed to protect those like them. She’d never revealed much about her history, but I got the sense that she’d had a lot of crappy family stuff happen and been thrown about in the system with no-one ever really helping her. At least she knew a little about her parents though, even if they were, in her own words, ‘a fucking alky and a dickhead scally who spunked and ran’. I had no idea about mine, but in all honesty, I expected them to be roughly the same.

“Lonnie?” I knew this was going to sound horribly cheesy, but I needed to let her know how grateful I was, “Thank you. Really, thank you.”

“Sure, babe,” she sipped her coffee, shuddering at the bitterness. The snoring coming from the sleeping man on the floor reached another crescendo, and I could see her gearing up to forcibly shut him up again. Before she could, however, she played the gracious host and invited me to do so instead.

Though I was sat down, I gave my foot as much force as I could and connected with the small of his back, “Shut the fuck up, Kyle!”

She met my expectant smile with a validating grin, “Yeah, you’re gonna fit in just fine here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Catra's intiation starts her life in the Horde on a literal high note


	2. Initiation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adjusting to life with Lonnie and the Horde, Catra goes through the same rite of passage that all new members have to - sampling the merchandise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are gonna go downhill, but not just yet. Today, we've got some fun!
> 
> And just to warn, there's drugs and drug-taking ahead!

My first few days at Lonnie’s were really rather strange, but I guess that's what happens in the week after you uproot your entire life. It was all a bit unreal being in this unfamiliar place and knowing that I wasn't going home because this now _was_ home _._ I stayed indoors pretty much the entire time, cleaning and tidying her apartment from corner to corner; I told her it was the best way I could thank her for taking me in, but there was an ulterior motive. Lonnie probably guessed anyway, though she didn’t say anything, but I was absolutely terrified of Mrs Weaver finding me. I knew that if she ever discovered where I was, she’d drag me back with as much force as she could and subject me to worse than anything I’d experienced at her hands before. But with my self-imposed quarantine, I’d at least be safe.

I expected that when she’d woken up and found my bedroom empty with all my stuff gone, she must have gone apeshit. She liked to think that she had control over our lives, that we couldn’t do anything without her clear and unequivocal permission, so to find that I had gone must have been like a giant middle finger to her. The only regret I had about leaving was that her rage would have had to find an outlet somewhere, and the other kids in the home must have taken the brunt of it. I know they would all have supported me, and not blamed me for what she did to them, but I had some good friends there who were most likely suffering as a result.

Lonnie also introduced me properly to her Horde gang friends, people I would no doubt be getting to know very well when I started actually working with them. There was Kyle, of course, who I had met on my first morning; as I guessed from the way Lonnie treated him, he was a bit of a running joke – unlucky, clumsy, the one who always gets blamed for everything. But once I started talking to him and Lonnie, I got to see the other side, the one that she kept him around for: he was pretty intelligent, the numbers guy for their little operation, and also incredibly dependable. As Lonnie told me, ‘he might be a dickhead, but if you’re ever in trouble, he’s the dickhead you want to call.’

The Horde’s crew in this area of town was rounded out by a guy called Rogelio. He was more of the strong, silent type – I don’t think he said more than three words during the whole two hours he was in the apartment the first day I met him. It was pretty clear that he was the muscle; he was built like a brick shithouse – if he wasn't a rugby player at school, he should have been – and I had no doubt that if you got on the wrong side of him, Rogelio would fuck you up. Weirdly, despite the terrifyingly antisocial vibes I got off him, he and Kyle seemed to be pretty close… I guess opposites attract or some crap like that.

But to fully initiate me into the Horde, Lonnie had arranged a little house party. Honestly, it sounded pretty ominous, like some of the shit you see in American college movies with people going through trials in order to join the Kappa Gumbo Deltas or whatever. I don’t actually know what that means, only the nerds did Latin at school. Anyway, by 9 o’clock the tiny apartment was stuffed full of people, mostly Horde gang members from other parts of the city enjoying copious amounts of alcohol and a plethora of things to smoke. For a drug gang, they seemed to really care about camaraderie.

“Alright, shut the fuck up!” an already drunk Lonnie shouted above the noise of the conversation, turning the volume down on the repetitive dance music someone had put on. I’m pretty sure she hated it as much as I did and was looking for any opportunity to turn it off, “As you all know, we’ve got a new girl in our midst. Catra?”

I felt the entire, cigarette smoke-hazed room staring at me, and stood up nervously, half-wondering if I should take a bow or something. Instead, I went for a mumbled ‘hi’.

“As is tradition,” she continued with a wry smile, “you cannot be a proper member of the Horde without sampling some of the merchandise. And I think Kyle got you something that will blow your tiny little tits off.”

I chuckled a little at her choice of phrase, even though it was maybe needlessly personal, and took a swig of beer for confidence. It surprised me that I was so nervous, although a nagging voice in the back of my mind was telling me that there would be some kind of trick – maybe they’d give me some benign vitamin pill instead and see if I started acting high out of a placebo effect. Or maybe they’d do something far worse, like hold me down while they injected me with god knows what. Is that a thing that happens? No, I had to remind myself, they were people I could trust. If they weren't, they'd have sold me out to Weaver days ago.

Kyle picked a small plastic bag from his pocket and handed it to Lonnie who dipped her little finger inside the white powder it contained before licking it off and sighing happily, “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. Catra, you ready?”

“I… uh…” what was the best way to tell a room full of intoxicated drug dealers that my only involvement with narcotics so far was a few joints behind the school gym? I was worried that my inexperience would show me up or get me kicked out before I’d even got into the gang. I was no angel, but I felt like Mother fucking Teresa at that moment.

A couple of voices around me provided what was intended as encouragement but felt more like pressure. Thankfully, Lonnie seemed to have read my mind and began to help. She moved a couple of almost-overflowing ashtrays and half-finished beer cans from the coffee table and dumped the contents of the little bag onto it before corralling the white powder into a neat line using someone’s debit card. I stared into it, psyching myself up for the next part, barely noticing the rolled up banknote she had shoved in front of me.

“Hey, all yours. Pro tip – do it all in one go, much better that way," she whispered into my ear. 

“Yeah, sure,” I muttered, taking the note from her and leaning forward, my eyes - and, more importantly, my nose - now inches from the drugs.

“Not scared, are you, Catra?”

I was terrified, but I wasn’t going to give a dozen gang members the satisfaction of laughing at me chickening out. Besides, I knew how much Mrs Weaver would hate the idea of me doing coke and the thought of her freaking out gave me that little bit more encouragement to go through with it. Spiting that old woman was a fucking good reason to do anything, “Never.”

I threw caution to the wind and, as per Lonnie’s suggestion, hoovered it all up in one go. What struck me first was the smell – I wasn’t sure what I had expected it to smell like, but the strong odour of petrol was somewhat of a shock. It overwhelmed my nose and the back of my throat, like eating an entire packet of extra strong mints all at once, only it wasn’t minty and probably cost a little bit more. I tried swallowing hard a few times to see if I could get rid of the burning sensation, but it made no difference.

“Fucking hell,” I coughed as Lonnie grabbed hold of me in celebration, announcing to the room that I was now officially one of the Horde. I heard the music start thumping again, though I was in my own world of a rapidly-numbing throat and my brain asking what the hell I had just done.

“You okay?” she whispered. I already trusted her, but that was the moment that I knew just how far that trust could go. Despite the pressured environment, despite the fact that she was on her eighth beer and despite her being surrounded by people she barely knew, Lonnie still made sure to check in with me. It told me that I was safe with her, that even in the midst of a loud, drug-fuelled party, that she was looking out for me. And God knows someone needed to.

I nodded rapidly in response, fanning my face with my hand, “Feeling a bit hot though, it’s so warm in here, isn’t it?”

“Come,” she ordered, pulling me up from the sofa by my wrist and leading me through a cloud of weed smoke to the open window, “This should cool you down.”

My heart was thumping rapidly in my chest, and with it a rising panic that something was wrong. I’d heard horror stories about people who had bad reactions to taking drugs and had heart attacks – what if that was happening to me now? Was it normal to feel this hot? Wasn’t that a symptom of a heart attack? Shit.

“Lonnie, I think I’m dying,” I said in panic, the words tumbling from my mouth before I’d even thought of them, “I’m literally dying right now, Lonnie. You have to call an ambulance or something.”

She chuckled to herself, no doubt having seen this hundreds of times before, and smoothed down the back of my hair, “Relax, Catra, you’re fine.”

“But what if I’m dying, Lonnie?” I grabbed her shoulders roughly, my voice increasing in volume, “What if I’m already dead?! That would be your fault!”

“Look, everyone’s like this the first time. Just give it a couple more minutes and you’ll start having a bit more fun, OK?”

I was sceptical, but I took Lonnie at her word, staring out at the world while a light breeze offered the slightest of respite to my burning face. Orange sodium lights illuminated grey concrete whilst half a dozen kids leant against the wall of a neighbouring apartment block and a solitary young woman hurried to the safety of her front door. I started thinking about the contrast between this place and the foster home, a giant townhouse in a well-to-do leafy suburb, and how I’d found a much better life here in the space of a week than she had given me in eighteen years.

“Feeling it yet?” Lonnie tapped my arm, and I wheeled around, startled, with a huge grin on my face.

“I feel great! Like, super, super great. I can’t believe I’ve never tried cocaine before, everyone should have some. Can we get some for everyone? Kyle? Kyle!”

Like an obedient dog, which was actually not far off the reality given his floppy hair, Kyle came bounding over the moment I called his name. I had no idea how he stayed in such a good mood all the time with everyone treating him like crap; maybe he made liberal use of the drugs that he sold. Heck, if it felt like this all the time, I would too.

“Heyyyy, Kyle,” I drawled, clumsily placing the palm of my hand on his chest. My words came out at the same speed the thoughts ran through my head, “What’s a girl gotta do to get some more cocaine? Cause I will… I will do anything. I could, I could, I could… I could get you some more drinks from the shop. Are you running low? You look like you’re running low. I could do that for you, Kyle, because I care. Or if you wanted, we could come to some other sort of arrangement…”

He looked like a rabbit caught in headlights, his gaze darting between Lonnie and I hoping for one of us to say something that might give him an exit, “Uhhh…”

“Talking about sex, Kyle!”

“Oi, calm it down, you! Take it easy,” Lonnie saved him from the awkwardness of having to respond. I’m sure he would have enjoyed it though, I was hotter than anything he could ever get and I would have done literally anything to get more coke out of him, “I thought you were gay, anyway?”

My head jerked around at each rapid fire of my synapses, thoughts and responses coming through faster and more clearly than ever before, “I _am_ gay! Yes! It’s amazing! Lonnie! Lonnie! I'm gay!”

“Okay, Catra, why don’t you go sit down for a bit?” Lonnie gently ushered me away from a still stunned Kyle.

I shook my head vigorously. I wasn’t going to be treated like some little kid staying up past her bedtime, “I don’t wanna sit down! I’m not tired, I’m fine… I could run a fucking marathon right now, Lonnie. Wait, we should go for a run! I wanted to get fit, you should come join me. Let’s do it, Lonnie! Let’s get fit!”

“How about we do that tomorrow?” she spoke so slowly, a real contrast to all the amazing ideas I was coming out with. Honestly, I couldn’t work out why drugs were supposedly so bad and illegal – if everyone took them all the time, this country would be in a much better place. I could have solved anything I put my mind to right now, and I had hundreds of incredible plans all fighting to come out and improve everyone's lives. But Lonnie was trying to stop me - she might have just doomed the entire universe or something, I was a million per cent certain that one of my ideas would have saved the world. 

“But what about now?”

She pulled me through the debris that was now piling up on the floor and pushed me with a little force back onto the sofa. I tried to get back up, annoyed that I’d been cut down in the middle of the best feeling I’d had in years, but she returned me a little more strongly and with one hell of a death stare, “ _Now_ , you sit. Okay? I’ll be back to check on you in a few minutes.”

“You’re the fucking worst, Lonnie!” I was starting to get angry, but she had already walked off and my words were lost in the hubbub. It felt like she didn’t even care what I had to say, didn’t want to hear my ideas – I could have transformed the Horde, I could have come up with so many amazing things that would have made her life better. But no, she just walked off and left me, abandoning what would have been the greatest, most important conversation of her entire life.

I don’t actually remember how long she was gone for, but I spent most of the time talking to some guy next to me. Fairly sure his name was Shaun or something, I wasn’t really paying attention, but he was telling me all about the gang’s leader, some bloke called Hordak. Supposedly this Hordak was a ruthless drug lord, someone who had killed people with his bare hands just for daring to owe him money, but the photo he showed me was of some pasty white emo kid. If everyone was scared of him, they had to be a bunch of pussies; he looked like he could be knocked out by a slight breeze. Still, I wasn’t going to let myself get in trouble – I was here to make a proper living for myself, to get the independence I’d been denied my whole life. I had a chance to prove Mrs Weaver wrong, to show her that I _would_ amount to something, and I had to take it.

Judging the silence around me when I heard Lonnie’s voice again, I must have dozed off at some point. The apartment was empty apart from Kyle and Rogelio collapsed together amidst the chaos of pizza boxes and empty bottles on the floor, and the sky outside was showing a hint of sun on the horizon. I looked at my phone to check the time, but it was completely dead.

“What time is it?” I rubbed my eyes, feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. My entire body ached, and there was pounding in my head that made it hard to focus. It was probably the thick blanket of smoke in the room I’d been sleeping in, or the awkward sitting position I had been in for God knows how many hours. Or, more likely, the comedown from my high.

“It’s 4.30.”

“Oh okay. Thanks for looking after me, Lonnie,” I whispered. In my mind I was smiling, but I don’t think the muscles in my face were obeying the instruction. I attempted to stand, holding onto Lonnie’s shoulder for stability, but my weight proved too much for her to support and we both collapsed onto the sofa. As I raised my gaze upward, the streetlights outside lit her face in a way I’d never noticed before, highlighting the roughness of her skin and remnants of spots and scars long gone. Her eyes, too, were captivating, a beautiful chestnut brown and… why was I thinking about this?

Was Lonnie thinking the same too? Was she looking into my eyes, marvelling at their depth, and tracing the same contours on my face as I was with hers? I knew it was a gamble, but I recalled how she offered me a place to stay, saving me from that evil old woman, and how she was looking after me during the party. It was a clear indication in my mind that she really cared, and maybe we could blur the lines of friendship like she seemed to have done with Kyle and Rogelio. I took a deep breath, swallowed down hard on my scratchy throat, and brought my lips towards hers.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Catra!” she jumped off me, crushing a half-empty can underneath her foot and most of my hope underneath her reaction.

“I… oh fuck, uh… I’m sorry.”

Her initial repulsion seemed to ease, and she took a seat next to me, holding my hand in hers, “No, no... I'm sorry, I shouldn't have... Look, you’re a nice girl, Catra, but you’re still pretty much a kid. You don’t know me, not properly yet, and I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“Then let me get to know you,” I implored, running my hand up her arm. My tone was less romantic than it was annoyed – I’d moved here to get away from people telling me I was too young to do things, that I didn’t know what I was doing, “I’m not a fucking kid anymore, Lonnie. I can make my own decisions.”

“Catra…”

We both sighed simultaneously. Hers was probably one of pity, but mine came from a place of frustration. I was 18 years old, and yeah, that’s not quite an adult but I wasn’t a child anymore, I’d had to mature at an early age thanks to the place I grew up in. And Lonnie was only a couple of years older – why she thought she could talk down to me, I don’t know.

She stood upright again, and I found myself staring intently as her arm slipped from my grip. Whilst my palm lamented the loss of her warmth, she carefully stepped her way through debris and sleeping people, turning back to me when she made it to the doorway, “Look, Catra. Let’s forget that happened – I don’t want it to be awkward, and I don’t want to treat you like you’re immature. You’re a good kid… well, a good young woman, and you’re gonna do really well in the Horde. But you need to get yourself set up and comfortable with living here before you think about anything else, okay?”

I don’t know if she quite meant that to sound like ‘I’ll be with you if you wait a little bit first’, but that’s how my brain interpreted it. That little glimmer of hope put me at ease, dissipating every bit of awkwardness in the room, and it felt as though I had a goal – show Lonnie I was mature, that I can work for the Horde as well as anyone older, and we stood a chance together. Within months, maybe weeks, I could go from the useless runaway to a successful young businesswoman with a hot older girlfriend. If I worked hard enough, anyway, and I was determined to do that.

I nodded my agreement at her, but she had already left the room. It crossed my mind that maybe I should follow her, head to the bedroom to share the bed and show her that there was no embarrassment, but my body suggested otherwise. The aching of my heavy legs refused to let me stand, and even our short conversation had started to prove a little too much for my sore head. I let myself fall gently across the cushions once more and sleep quickly enveloped me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Catra's first day on the job (and a little cameo from a couple of people you may know...)
> 
> As always, let me know what you thought in the comments or you can find me on tumblr @lisshstuff and twitter @alice_hancock1 if you want to do it there too :)
> 
> I'm aiming to have a new chapter out every Sunday, so the next one should hopefully be in a week's time.


	3. First Day on the Job

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catra battles her nerves for her introduction to selling drugs from the Horde

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little surprise, seeing as it's Christmas (albeit not in the least bit festive!)
> 
> This chapter contains more drug use

The first day of my new job wasn’t exactly the typical ‘introduce yourself to the office’ thing. There was no early morning wake-up, no sitting in traffic praying the last parking space hasn’t been taken, and definitely no business casual dress code. Rather, my first day meant being woken up at 10am by Lonnie bringing me a coffee and telling me the delivery would be here any second.

I’d been told how the operation worked the day before: once a week, Kyle would come over with the stuff for us to sell, we would take it, go and sell it and then give him the money in exchange for our share of the profits. He, in turn, would crunch the numbers and report back to Hordak who, I had been warned numerous times, was extremely strict when it came to accounting. Even a few quid short would result in a terrifying dressing-down, and as for large shortages... let’s just say people didn’t make that mistake a second time. It was a simple way of doing things, but it had proven very effective in taking the Horde from a small operation to one of the biggest gangs in the city. Even better, at least in my view, was the fact that we were allowed – encouraged, even – to take some for ourselves. We had to pay for it out of our own cut, of course, but it meant we had unfettered access to the best stuff. A perk of the job, some might say.

“You nervous?” Lonnie sat halfway down the bed, gently stroking the side of my hair with her hand. That tender gesture had a wonderfully calming effect, though maybe not quite what I needed in order to wake up properly. She was so good at putting me at ease, so caring and, if I would let myself say it, loving.

I gingerly sipped the coffee, trying to let its bitter warmth bring me to consciousness, “A little.”

“No need to be, I’ll be with you today, Kitty Cat.”

I chuckled faintly at her nickname for me. She’d started calling me Kitty Cat the day after my initiation. I assumed at first that it was a kind of code name and that they all had one, but no, the Horde wasn’t some secret spy agency with aliases for all its members; she was just being cutesy. But despite it being a private thing between us, I loved it – every time she used that name for me, my stomach flipped and I melted a little inside. God, I really had it bad for her, didn’t I?

“Thanks, Lonnie,” much as it pained me to do so, I hauled myself upright and out of her reach. I’d have loved to stay there, the gentle touch of her hand behind my ears spreading warmth through me, but responsibility called. I didn’t want to let down the gang by missing out on my first day, “It’s going to be okay, isn’t it?”

“Of course!” she laughed, “I thought we’d start off at the university. It’s a pretty easy place to sell, there’s always students who need that little extra help, and there’s very little risk of getting caught. You can make a fucking mint there – most of them have no idea how much a couple of pills should cost, so I just make it up and they usually pay up. If you want, you-”

She was cut off by the abrasive sound of the door buzzer and excused herself to answer it. I took the opportunity to move and throw on a T-shirt and some leggings from my bag. There wasn’t really any space for my stuff in the solitary chest of drawers in the room, so I was still living out of these two holdalls until I had the money to get something better to store my clothes in. After applying a liberal amount of body spray – it was quicker than waiting for the water to heat up to have a shower – I joined Lonnie and Kyle in the lounge, where they explained again what I’d have to do.

I don’t know if they were anticipating that I would have some kind of moral objection, but the continual pauses, expectant looks and ‘any questions?’ started to get to me. They knew I wasn’t the sort of person to worry about breaking the law or risking trouble – I’d spent most of the last two years at school bunking off to go down the Crimson Rec and spend the day messing around with my mates, usually causing trouble and smoking weed. I’d only been caught once, and I got in a shitload of trouble with Mrs Weaver for it, but once that had died down I was straight back down there. It wasn’t like school could have taught me anything useful anyway, not like today would.

But it was a different educational establishment we were heading to today; Etheria University’s campus was centred around a main road, with buildings of vastly varying ages spread off to each side. This, according to Lonnie, played to our advantage – not only were most of the students based in this small area, but the layout meant there were dozens of quiet little corners we could bring people to for a little more privacy if we needed it. She gave me a quick tour, in particular showing me a rarely-used car park in the shadow of a huge concrete tower which, according to the sign outside, was the “Norwyn Building”. It was an ugly monstrosity, but I wasn’t here to critique the architecture.

“Let’s go find one of my regulars,” Lonnie grabbed my hand and we hurried towards a more populated courtyard. Students rushed about in all directions, many clutching folders full of paperwork or laden down with half a dozen textbooks squeezed into a backpack, whilst others sat chatting and laughing on benches.

I couldn’t help but wonder if I could have been one of those students if life had dealt me a better hand. Maybe, if my parents hadn’t fucked off and left me with Mrs Weaver, I could have done really well at school and gone on to study here, really excelled in whatever I came here to do. I imagined some kind of parallel universe version of myself, being welcomed back home from school by my mum and dad, and their smiling faces handing me an envelope with the university’s logo on the front. We’d all hold our breath, knowing that it would tell me if I’d been accepted into Etheria Uni, and my hands would be so shaky with nerves that my dad would have to open it. He’d give it to me and I’d unfold it and start reading: _Dear Miss Merrifield –_ I don’t know why I always assumed that would be my parents’ surname, it just seemed to fit in my young mind – _we are pleased to welcome you to Etheria University._

I’d stop reading there, let the letter fall to the floor and start screaming with excitement. My parents would both hug me, and my mum would kiss my forehead and say ‘Looks like we have something to celebrate’, then she’d tell me to get changed because we were going out for dinner. I’d run up to my room and start flicking through my wardrobe for something nice, all the while thinking about where I’d like to go to eat. The mature part of me would be thinking about some posh restaurant, while the childish part would be begging for McDonald’s, and I’d end up letting my dad decide. That was the dream, at least; the reality was that I was only here on the university campus to sell drugs.

“Ow! Watch it, ya fucking twat!” Lonnie snapped, colliding with three girls walking in the opposite direction as we crossed the courtyard.

Whilst the other two kept walking, the small, angry-looking one with purple hair stopped and grabbed Lonnie’s arm, “You watch it!”

I could see the anger descending on Lonnie and wondered if I would have to defuse a potential fight. She was really sweet most of the time, a really good friend, but I’d seen her get angry a couple of times before and holy fuck did she get angry. I vividly remember a time we were hanging out in the park and a sketchy guy started harassing us. After the third time of us politely telling him to leave us alone, Lonnie just snapped and knocked him out in one punch. It was amazing, the dickhead deserved it, but somewhat scary too, knowing she could flick into that sort of violent rage in a blink of an eye.

“Glimmer, don’t. It’s not worth getting annoyed over,” the nerdy looking girl next to her pulled the angry one away, stepping in at just the right moment to avoid an explosion of Lonnie’s temper. She gave an apologetic smile, “Sorry about her, tough day.”

“Whatever.”

Sending the trio on their way with an intense stare, Lonnie muttered something about the campus being full of gobshites, then returned the smile to her face as quickly as it had vanished. She pointed out a smartly-dressed man with a striking mop of light blue hair – what was it about students here and dyeing their hair stupid colours? He waved back, and she gently nudged me towards him.

“That’s Peekablue. I told him I’d have you with me today, so go ahead.”

This was the point at which all my worries rushed into my head - what if I messed up? What if I gave him the wrong thing, or overcharged him? What if people saw us? We were in the middle of a massive open space that seemed to be used as a cut through between the two biggest buildings at the university. I suddenly felt a lot less confident, “Are you sure, Lonnie? I don’t know what to do.”

“Of course you do, Kitty Cat,” her hand slipped from my shoulder blade downwards, coming to rest on my butt and pushing me forward, “I know you’re not going to let me down, are you? You’re a good girl.”

She knew me too well. All she needed to do was use her pet name for me and touch me up and I was putty in her hands. Not that I would have chickened out if she hadn’t done that, I was determined not to fuck up, but she certainly spurred me on and I strutted confidently over to this guy she’d lined up for me. He really did not look anything like I expected any of the buyers to look like – when Lonnie said we were going to the university to sell, I envisioned long-haired skater kids in band T-shirts buying weed, or overworked girls with bloodshot eyes begging us for something that could keep them up for a third night to work on their essays. This Peekablue guy seemed so… so normal, sophisticated even.

That impression grew the nearer I got. His hair was not just blue, it shimmered in the light, highlighting every perfectly coiffured end, like he’d just come out of the salon. The fingers on the hand he reached out to me with were expertly manicured and painted to match. I started wondering if this was some kind of practical joke – surely there was no way this guy was hooked on any form of drugs. Spa treatments, maybe, but not drugs.

“Hello, my dear, you must be the wonderful Catra,” he reached for my hand and gently kissed it. Normally I’d be incredibly creeped out by a man doing that and waiting for the inevitable moment he tried to pull my head into his crotch, but I got the impression that women weren’t really his sort of thing, “Lonnie has told me so much about you.”

I couldn’t help but blush at the thought of Lonnie saying things about me to her friends. I wondered what impression they got of our relationship – maybe if people thought we were a little more than friends, it would validate my feelings for her and tell me it wasn’t all in my head, “I hope it was all good.”

“She thinks you’re magnificent, duck! But, alas, much as it pains me, I cannot spend all afternoon regaling you with praise. I’m here for some of your merchandise, after all.”

My hand flew up to my mouth to cover my audible gasp and I instinctively glanced around me, fearing that someone nearby would have not just heard Peekablue, but also understood what he meant. I was half expecting to be swooped upon by armed police or something, but people were milling about just the same as they were before. No-one even seemed to bat an eyelid when he held out a couple of banknotes for me to take, nor when I hastily grabbed them and shoved them into my pocket.

“Th-thanks,” I stuttered, wondering why this had made me so nervous. I’d done plenty of illegal shit before and never felt this level of anxiety – maybe it was knowing that my future depended on me getting this right. In the past, all that getting caught scribbling graffiti on a door or shoplifting a couple of pairs of jeans would have got me was a slap on the wrist from the cops and several, much harder, slaps from Mrs Weaver. And that would be it, I’d move on to the next thing. But this… If I failed at this, I could get arrested, sent back to the home, lose Lonnie and more. And if I were thrown back under that woman’s roof, I would never make it out alive, not after trying to run away. Getting this right was literally a matter of life and death for me.

“Uh, sweetheart!” Peekablue called after me as I walked confidently back towards Lonnie, “Didn’t you forget something? Something small and brightly-coloured… and _mine_?”

Shit, the pills. I almost fell over myself rushing back towards him and reaching into the satchel I was carrying. If I ever had to be worried about drawing attention to what I was doing, it was when the loud, high-pitched ‘Oh!’ escaped from my mouth. But even then, nobody gave a shit. Was being a drug dealer really this easy that you can go into a busy place and make a loud noise and still be left alone? No wonder Lonnie wanted me to get in on it.

I gabbled more apologies as I fumbled around for the little bag to give him, flashing the sweetest smile I could muster as some kind of defence. Thankfully, Peekablue seemed to be an understanding sort of guy, and graciously took the pills from me without making any further fuss. As I rejoined Lonnie, however, the embarrassment gave way to the thrill of knowing I’d successfully done my first deal. Well, almost successfully.

We bid him farewell, and I followed Lonnie around, watching intently as she met with other customers. These were more the sort of people I expected to see, largely stoner kids buying a few ounces of weed, but the wad of cash she had amassed by the time we had finished was impressive. For a couple of hours’ work, she must have taken about a hundred and fifty quid – of course, Hordak would take the lion’s share of that, but it was eye-opening to see how lucrative this line of work could be.

It impressed me just how much Lonnie clicked with the people she sold to, as well. I’d never been with her on the job before – too much risk, she said – but I always assumed it would be heads down, barely a word spoken and deal done. But she was talking to them like friends, asking about their day, laughing at funny stories about their pets and stuff like that. According to Lonnie, building up a loyal customer base was key and that apparently meant being friendly with the people you sell drugs to. Now I generally hated people, but if it was to make money, I was sure I could fake some level of hospitality.

The sun was dipping down below the horizon when we arrived back home, a handful of streetlights bursting into life to do their night’s work following us through the drab pedestrianised area. I’d gained so much confidence from our trip out – now I _knew_ I could this, _knew_ I could become successful in the Horde, and the unwavering grin on my face made it clear. Freedom was actually within my grasp now, not just the prospect of it depending on whether I could step up to this new world of selling drugs. I _could_ step up; I _had_ stepped up.

“Hell yeah!” Lonnie grabbed hold of me as soon as we’d crossed the threshold into her apartment and planted a kiss on my cheek, “Time to celebrate a successful first day, what do you say?”

“Sure,” I wished I’d responded more enthusiastically the second I’d said that, but I was still a little stunned from the kiss, even if it was a simple peck on the cheek. There were so many doubts in my mind, so many mixed messages I was getting from her – sure, the night of my initiation she’d recoiled in horror after I kissed her, but ever since then she had been so touchy-feely, so flirtatious. She even cuddled up to me in bed most nights, and consciously so, we had whole conversations while she was wrapped around me. Maybe she thought she had made a mistake with her reaction. Or maybe I was reading too far into it.

Lonnie ordered me to sit on the sofa while she went into the kitchen, re-emerging with a couple of cans of beer. She handed one to me and proposed a toast to our successful partnership – was she using that word deliberately? – then sat down beside me, holding out a small paper bag.

“Here, thought we should at least do some quality control on the stuff we’re selling.”

I reached in and my hand came out gripping a small, red pill between my index finger and my thumb. It was identical to the one I’d sold to the guy earlier, so rather too late for quality control if we’d already parted with several of them, but I wasn’t exactly going to complain. The pill almost looked like one of the little hard candies that come in those dispensers – ironic, really, given that these were most definitely _not_ for kids. I looked up at Lonnie, my face asking for confirmation that I’d picked out the right thing, and she nodded, prompting me to continue.

“Let’s do this,” I announced to no-one in particular, washing the tablet down with a mouthful of beer. While I hadn’t had whatever this was before, I was getting used to how the various things we’d tried affected my body – I guess I was becoming more responsible. Sort of.

The two of us sat drinking and chatting as our contentedness blossomed into euphoria and our weariness gave way to a livelier excitement. I don’t remember what exactly we talked about, but I know that Lonnie seemed to be the funniest person I’d ever talked to. I was hanging on her every word, in fits of giggles with each thing she said, and I loved it. If I could have bottled a feeling to keep me going when I felt down, it would have been the feeling I had in that moment. My worries about failing in the Horde and my memories of Mrs Weaver and the foster home all vanished, replaced by a single instant of time in which I could just exist and be happy.

I don’t know how long we ended up staying awake chatting for, nor how many more pills we took to sustain it, but the feeling of contentment stayed well into the early hours. I would happily have kept going forever if I could, but the harshness of reality began flickering faintly into view, no longer quite so chained away by the drugs. It still felt amazing, but in a more real way this time, like I could acknowledge my troubles without being bothered by them.

“Lonnie?” I asked quietly, my eyes fixed on the same patch of ceiling I’d been contemplating for a quarter of an hour. I wasn’t even sure if she was still awake.

It took a good 20 seconds for her to answer, “Yeah?”

“I am gonna be alright here, aren’t I?”

She wearily rolled onto her side, falling slightly forward to rest her chin on my shoulder, “You mean like, now? Like, sitting on the sofa off your face on Es?”

“I’m not ‘off my face’,” I laughed way too long for that to be proven true. Lonnie hummed a sound of doubt, prompting me to playfully push her away, “I’m fucking not! Don’t… Ugh, never mind. No, I meant like living here and being in the Horde. It’s gonna work out, isn’t it?”

Although it was decidedly too late for me to back out on the biggest decision I’d ever made, I needed to hear someone reassure me that I’d made the right choice. For once in my shitty life, I just wanted someone to say, ‘you did good, Catra’ and stop me questioning every damn thing I did.

“It is,” she replied simply, but it was enough for the warmth of her support to spread through me. Two tiny words, but they meant everything – finally, I was not the only one fighting my corner. Lonnie believed in me too, and maybe that meant I could let myself dream that little bit bigger. Just maybe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time - INCOMING ANGST! Mrs Weaver is back on the scene...


	4. Weaver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catra takes a risk to meet up with a girl from her foster home, but they're discovered by someone she would rather not have encountered again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK, here starts the angsty portion of this fic! Shadow Weaver is utter garbage, but I love writing her because of that.
> 
> And just to warn, this chapter contains abuse, drug taking and gets a tiny bit spicy towards the end.

It felt like I was perfectly suited to life in the Horde. Every challenge that came my way, I rose up to and overcame it, and the more challenges I overcame, the better I felt about myself. When I first started dealing, I was worried about making mistakes or getting in trouble, but that never happened. In fact, I’d never felt as confident as I did coming home each day with several hundred pounds in my pocket. Okay, not all of that would turn out to be mine, but my portion was more than enough for me to start living the life I desired. I could finally afford to buy a whole new wardrobe, to dress myself in clothes I had chosen for myself, not hand-me-downs with patched-up holes and logos that had disintegrated with age.

This independence was something I had wanted, something I had _needed_ , for years. I could finally make my own decisions, I could support myself without relying on someone who despised my existence to control my finances. That was one of the other things I couldn’t wait to get away from – Mrs Weaver never let us access our own money without her permission, and we had to tell her exactly what we were going to use it for and bring back receipts. Half the time she wouldn’t even let me have any of mine, so I had to depend on the generosity of friends, Lonnie in particular, and I was determined to return the favour.

Lonnie had helped me start off by handing a couple of her customers over to me, just so I had a foundation to build on. While I was initially met with scepticism and wariness, between Lonnie vouching for me and my own particular brand of client relations (I spent an afternoon getting high with them), those two had grown to a couple of dozen regulars. I didn’t really know what constituted being good in this line of work, but fuck me, I was good at it.

But while my future was looking better than ever, it was parts of the past that were playing on my mind more and more. Yes, Mrs Weaver’s home was a house of absolute fuckery, but it wasn’t all bad – the other kids made it that tiny bit more bearable. And one girl in particular, Sammie. She had arrived a few years after I did, and we were inseparable from then on. I had no family, and I definitely didn’t consider Weaver a mother, but Sammie was my little sister, and I would have happily said as much to anyone who listened. Having not seen her for a few months, however, was agony. She knew I was leaving – I’d discussed it at length with her over the weeks before my 18th because I trusted her not to say anything – but I wanted to keep both of us safe, and that meant having no contact. It wasn’t that I thought that Mrs Weaver would try and listen in to phone calls or read emails to find out where I was; she absolutely would do that if she knew how to. Rather, it was my worry that if the evil old woman found out that Sammie had been in contact with me, the punishment she would inflict would almost certainly be in the ‘life-threatening’ range.

It still hurt though, not being able to see the only person in my life that I considered family. I would have tried calling her had I not had to change my phone so Weaver couldn’t find me and going to the home was well out of the question. The only place I knew I could find her, and that we would be away from Dame Dickhead would be at her school. Unlike me, Sammie was a really bright kid with real prospects, so she actually bothered turning up there – in fact, she had a 100% attendance record. Nerd.

I’d deliberated about seeing her so much over the week before I decided to go for it. I knew it was a risk, that it could lead Mrs Weaver to me or get Sammie in trouble, but I fucking missed her so much. The one person who had been a constant source of love and support in my life, the person I trusted more than anyone, practically my sister – I needed to see her again. And on a bright but cold autumn afternoon, after a quick line for confidence, I made my way towards Bright Moon Academy of Technology (a fancy name for the _very_ un-fancy comprehensive school that all of Mrs Weaver’s kids went to), the place I’d spent the latter part of my teen years trying to avoid as much as I could.

I honestly felt like a creep, hanging around a school just out of sight and scanning the surroundings hoping that no-one would see me. I was half expecting some soccer-mom-type woman with a ‘speak to the manager’ haircut to start screaming “pedo!” at me or something, but I guess when you’re a teenager you don’t need mummy to wait around and pick you up in the playground. Besides, I had to remind myself, I wasn’t doing anything illegal by being there. OK, maybe having a pocketful of pills on the off chance that some of the older students might be interested wasn’t _exactly_ legal, but aside from that…

It was a nerve-wracking wait and, as five hundred students came pouring out of the gates almost at the same time, I was worried that I was going to miss her. But five minutes after the first kids came out, and dawdling along behind the crowds chatting to a couple of other girls – Sammie was always popular, too – there she was. I couldn’t help a smile spreading across my face just from the sight of her after so long, nor could I stop myself sprinting across the road.

“Sammie!” I had to yell a couple of times before she realised someone was calling her name. And once she turned to see me running towards her, her face lit up to match mine.

“Catra? Oh my God, Catra!” she threw her arms around me, accidentally making me breath in a mouthful of dark brown hair, “I missed you so much.”

I held her close, practically squeezing the life out of her to make up for all the hugs I’d missed out on over the last three months. We had so much to catch up on, so she bid goodbye to her friends and we headed off towards a small park nearby, the one I used to spend most of my school days in instead of actually learning. There wasn’t much there, it was mainly an open expanse of patchy grass and mud surrounded by a small, wooded area, but there were a couple of graffiti-covered benches that we could sit on. I even found the one that still bore the remnants of the time I wrote GAY BENCH in large letters with a permanent marker, because when you’re thirteen that is the height of humour, apparently. Maybe I had been trying to tell myself something.

“So...” I began as we both sat, not quite sure what to say. It was bizarre having spent the last few weeks thinking about what I was going to ask her, what I would tell her about my life, and now I actually had the opportunity, I completely blanked out.

“How’s life?” she saved me from the awkward silence, “Are you still staying with... what’s her name? Laura?”

“Lonnie. And yeah, we’re doing great. She’s found me some work, so I’m finally earning some money.”

Sammie seemed genuinely pleased that my escape had seen me land on my feet, and her approval made me proud, “That’s amazing Catra! Where are you working?”

Ah... that... that was not a question I really wanted to answer. I knew that I could tell her anything, and that she’d keep all my secrets, but drugs were a topic that was difficult for her. She’d lost both her parents to addiction, and it had almost cost her own life too. She wouldn’t exactly hate me for what I was doing, but it wouldn’t be comfortable for her.

“I, uh, I’m just selling… stuff.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, could I have made it any more obvious what I was doing? In my head I imagined that it would sound like I was working in a shop, or at worst in a call centre, scamming old ladies into buying shit they didn’t need, but ‘Oh, y’know, I’m just selling... uh, stuff...’ literally could not have screamed ‘I’M A DRUG DEALER’ any louder. It was hardly a surprise that she twigged what was really happening.

“Stuff?” she shot me a knowing look, with more than a hint of disapproval, “It’s drugs, isn’t it?”

I felt like I’d let her down, that I was somehow dishonouring her parents’ memory, and I couldn’t look her in the eye as I admitted it, “Yeah.”

“Come on, Catra,” Sammie shifted herself towards me, grabbing hold of my hands as she pleaded with me, “Don’t do that, I’m begging you. If you get addicted...”

“I won’t.”

“You don’t know that!” her passionate response was understandable, given the devastation that addiction had wrought upon her life; but I was in control, I was surrounded by people who were looking out for me, “Catra, please. I don’t want this to be the last time I ever see you.”

I didn’t want that either. We were the closest thing either of us had to family, and I knew the prospect of parting ways was as terrifying to her as it was to me, “I promise you it won’t be. Look, give me your number and I’ll call you as much as you want. We can arrange some proper time together, not a stolen half hour after I hung around outside your school waiting for you.”

Sammie nodded, unzipping a pocket on her backpack and searching for a pen. She ripped the corner off the page of a notebook and scribbled her phone number down. When she passed it over to me, I couldn’t help myself from laughing at the vivid pink ink that she’d used – she had pens that wrote in every colour under the sun, and most of her notebooks looked like rainbows of perfect handwriting. I used to joke about it with her, but mostly I was just envious – envious of how bright she was, how much of a future she would have once she left the home. Not like me.

“I won’t give you mine in case _she_ finds it, but I promise I will call soon,” I hated to remind myself of the difficulties of fully escaping from Mrs Weaver’s clutches, but that was just how things were. If she found my phone number, I’d be bombarded with phone calls demanding to know my whereabouts and eventually she would find me.

That would be amazing, I miss spending time…” Sammie trailed off into silence, the warmth vanishing from her face.

“Something wrong?”

“Catra you need to leave now,” she spoke with an eerie quietness, a complete transformation from how she’d been just seconds earlier. I glanced up to see her staring behind me and followed her eyeline to find out the reason she’d cut herself off mid-sentence. And that reason was walking briskly towards us in a red trench coat, with long dark hair buffeting around in the wind and a face like thunder. That reason was Mrs Weaver.

“Catra! Catra!” her voice was as full of disdain as it always seemed to be when saying my name. She wasn’t so much calling for me as barking an order, much like one would with a disobedient dog that had broken free of its leash to go and hump someone’s leg.

I gave Sammie’s hand a squeeze as I got up to get the hell out of there, “I’ve got your number now, I’ll be in touch, OK? Stay strong.”

“Catra! Catra!” the yelling was rapidly getting closer, “Samantha! Do NOT let her leave!”

I wasn’t going to hang around and let the old bitch drag me back into that home, and I began sprinting for the cover of the trees that lined the park, hoping that she wouldn’t be able to follow me or work out how to cut me off at the other end. That was the plan, at least. I’d just reached the very edge of the woodland when I heard Sammie scream, and it pinned me to the spot. I couldn’t leave, not if Weaver was hurting her. When I turned around, Sammie was knelt on the floor, the contents of her bag spilled out on the grass below, and Mrs Weaver had what looked like a very painful grip on her wrist. Seeing her hurt my friend – hell, my sister – made me see red, and I tore back across the field towards them both.

“You fucking let go of her!” I charged at her; my fist reeled back ready to punch her in her child-abusing face. But she was pretty sprightly for a woman in her 50s, and she sidestepped it, catching hold of my arm as I sailed by.

“Catra, we don’t hit people.”

I’m not sure whether I was more annoyed at her smarmy, condescending tone or the sheer hypocrisy in her words. It took a few splutters as my brain tried to process the brazen double standard before I finally made any sense, “That’s fucking rich, coming from you. How many times did you break my arm?”

“I will not apologise for trying to instil some discipline in you,” even now she still looked at me like I was a piece of shit on the bottom of her shoe, “Clearly it hasn’t worked.”

“Bullshit! It was never about discipline, you just like slapping kids!” I wasn’t going to hold back, not now. I tried to hold my tongue the entire time I lived under her roof, because there was never any point to calling her out on all the crap she did – all that got me was beaten or locked in my room for a night. Supposedly it was to ‘teach me a lesson about slandering people’, but mostly what I learnt was that I needed to hide food in my bedroom for those days when she refused to feed me.

We locked eyes, and I tried to push down the rage that was bubbling over in my chest. I wanted to hit her, I wanted to knock her flying and the consequences be damned. But the sound of Sammie sobbing on the floor next to me, begging me to stop, was just barely enough to push me back behind that line. I stared, stone-cold, into Mrs Weaver’s eyes, snarling with anger, knowing exactly what was going through her mind, “Do it. Fucking do it. Hit me, I fucking DARE YOU!”

“Catra, no! Stop!” my shouting startled Sammie, and she pulled at my hand, imploring me to walk away. I’d not fully thought of the effect it would have on her – the more that I antagonised Weaver, the more she would be punished once they were home. I knew how the old bitch worked, how her retribution was never limited to the person who had wronged her but also to those around them. If any of the other kids had seen me doing something I shouldn’t and she found out, they’d get smacked about too. I couldn’t subject Sammie to anything worse than I already had.

“I’d listen to Samantha if I were you, Catra. It would be a shame if anyone were to get hurt – don’t you think Julie would hate to find out that I did _not,_ in fact, give you permission to leave? I’m sure she would like you to return to me.”

Oh fuck. Julie was my key worker, the woman at the fostering agency who was tasked with ensuring my safety and happiness. Unsurprisingly, she was as useless as a knitted condom – Weaver had that woman wrapped around her little finger, playing the poor, put-upon foster mother who only wanted the best for her precious little cherubs. I don’t know if there were incriminating photos of Julie in the attic or something, but every single time social services came sniffing around because I’d been in hospital after yet another ‘accident’, it all disappeared remarkably quickly. Letting her hurt me more than once is incompetence, letting her hurt me on a daily basis was shady as fuck.

But there was something in Mrs Weaver’s words that did give me a little hope. Maybe it was just reading between the lines, but it sounded as though she’d already told my key worker that I had left the home. There was no guarantee she would keep to her word, but maybe the fact that she hadn’t already tracked me down suggested that she didn’t want to. I had been careful not to leave much trace, sure, but did I really think she wouldn’t find me? The woman had tried my entire life to keep tabs on me – and while I’d done my best to evade her, I was kidding myself if I thought she hadn’t used her friends or the other kids in her care to rat me out. Why would this time be any different?

My pause gave her the indication that I knew I was defeated, “That’s what I thought, Catra. Now why don’t you go back to whatever hole you’re living in now and stay there? Do not contact Samantha, or any of my family again.”

That… that actually hurt, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. We were never a family, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I felt it in my gut when she referred to the other kids as her ‘family’. But not me. I knew they wouldn’t exactly be playing the happy household without me, but her words cemented what I feared I already knew: that I didn’t ever belong there.

I tried my best to mask the sadness with more anger, though it was clear my heart wasn’t in it now, my voice noticeably shakier than before, “Family? You don’t have a family – it’s just you and a bunch of kids that you abuse.”

“Don’t be such a rude little girl, Catra,” she tutted loudly, as patronising as ever, “If you are rude, I can easily revoke my permission for you to be away from home. You should be thanking me for letting you do this.”

“Fuck off.”

“THANK ME!” she roared, one hand slapping my face whilst the other wrenched my wrist in a vice-like grip. In an instant, it turned me back into the terrified girl cowering in the corner of her room, desperately wishing her real mother would knock at the door to take her away. I hated this hold she had over me, that no matter how far I ran, no matter how independent I thought I was, Mrs Weaver would always know how to get me to do what she wanted. It was like I could never be free.

“Thank you, Mrs Weaver,” I mumbled quietly, though it was loud enough for her to hear and let go of me. I quickly turned and ran off so that she wouldn’t see me crying – I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of tears, but I’m pretty sure she knew they were coming. And the moment I was obscured by the trees, fucking hell did I cry. I collapsed to my knees, my hands digging into the dirt as my blurry eyes watched the teardrops moisten the ground. I absolutely despised myself – the way I let her walk all over me again and the way I’d put Sammie at risk by meeting her. It was as though leaving had changed nothing, and I was that troubled kid at her mercy all over again.

I returned home to an empty apartment, Lonnie having gone out with Kyle and Rogelio for the afternoon. It was just me and the pick of this week’s delivery, and by fuck was I going to go to town on it. _This will show her,_ I said to myself, _I’m a fucking adult and you can’t treat me like a child._ I practically ripped open a little bag of coke, desperate to prove to myself that I wasn’t who Mrs Weaver tried to make me think I was – I was a grown woman who could make my own decisions. And in that moment, I decided to get shitfaced.

When I heard the key turn in the lock, I was pretty far gone and if anything, more intensely focused on demonstrating that I wasn’t a kid anymore. I paced around the room, waiting for Lonnie to take off her shoes and dump her stuff by the door, steeling my resolve for what I was about to do. It would be a surprise, that much was true, but I was more certain than ever it would be a nice one.

“Hey Catra, how-” the second she set foot in the living room, I marched straight over to her and shut her up with a kiss. I could feel the initial shock, the slight freeze in her body as it processed what was happening, but her shoulders soon relaxed, and she leaned into me. I was forceful, but she responded with equal power, both of us pushing forward with the unbridled passion that had spread between us.

“You… me… bedroom now…” I panted in the brief moments in which I dared part from her lips, pushing her back into the hallway towards the room we shared. Lonnie yielded completely, our bodies staying connected as we stumbled in, then yearning for more when I pushed her onto the bed and stood over her.

She gazed up at me, the light reflecting the depth of her chestnut eyes, her perfect face slightly reddened with the heat we were both feeling, “What… where has this come from?”

“You really wanna…” I wrenched my top off, almost ripping it in half in my haste, “… ask questions right now?”

“No…” she panted, pulling me down on top of her, “Come on Kitty Cat, let’s fucking do this.”

* * *

When I came into hazy awareness thanks to the light streaming into the bedroom, it took me a few moments to work out what the strange sensation around my chest was. I lazily reached down, my memory being sparked when my hand touched the soft arms of the girl wrapped around me, and smiled wearily to myself. The previous night had been like nothing I had ever known – I was running on pure lust, an unquenchable thirst for Lonnie that had taken me over and led to an incredible night. And now, in the light of morning, I woke up not at the usual opposite end of the bed to her, next to her unexpectedly manicured feet, but instead encircled by her arms. This was true contentment.

But it wasn’t long before that bliss was encroached upon by anxiety. Sure, she might be hugging me while she’s fast asleep, but what if she woke up and regretted everything? I had taken a fair amount of drugs the night before and practically thrown myself at her without stopping to even consider what she wanted – what if I’d forced her into it? Shit, I couldn’t remember the specifics any more… if she had been pressured and not wanted it, there was no question that she would throw me out. I might as well have started packing there and then.

With the discomfort that thought had implanted in my mind, I tried carefully and quietly extracting myself from her embrace. I managed to move one of her arms, but she stirred as I tried to roll away, pulling me back in.

“Hey…” Lonnie groaned, her consciousness returning relatively quickly, “Come back.”

“No, I have to get up.”

She wasn’t going to let me leave, it seemed, “Stay a bit longer, Kitty Cat, you’re so soft and comfy. Last night was so much fun, we could do it all over again.”

I guess that answered my question about how she felt about what happened. My heart skipped a beat as I allowed myself to get lost in the thoughts of the two of us together – not just in the heat of sex, not those memories from last night, but thoughts of the future. I enjoyed what we did, no question about that, but my heart yearned more for the idea of Lonnie being my girlfriend. I’m sure most would say I was getting carried away – one night of passion does not equal a relationship, but it was more than just the sex. We practically acted like a proper couple half the time anyway. She had that… whatever it was… going on with Kyle, and I didn’t want to stop that, but I’m sure there was more between us.

“Are we cool?” I asked hesitantly. There had to be a better way to put it, but I couldn’t exactly come right out and say ‘hey, now we’ve had sex will you be my girlfriend?’.

Her answer was to prop herself up with an arm and lean over to kiss me, “We’re more than cool.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy new year to everyone!
> 
> Next time: A deal goes wrong for Catra


	5. The Deal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Catra's new life goes from strength to strength, she gets a horrific reminder of the business she's in

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's go for chapter 5!
> 
> Warnings for this one: drugs (as usual), non-graphic violence, very brief sex references

The following few weeks after our first night together were some of the best in my life. While Lonnie and I never had a specific conversation about it, we certainly started acting like we were together – regular kissing, holding hands in public, all that mushy stuff that couples do. And then there was the nightly mind-blowing sex that, on numerous occasions, reached a volume that made the neighbours bang on the wall. Which only made us deliberately louder, because fuck them, we’re young and we can have as much sex as we want.

Even outside of Lonnie, life was amazing. Following on from our disastrous first meeting, I made sure to contact Sammie so we could see each other more often. The one good thing in my life before I left the home was now one of many good things in my life after, and I needed the slight familiarity she provided to help me feel more at ease with the big changes I had made. Unsurprisingly, after the clusterfuck that happened in the park next to her school, we had to be a lot more careful that Mrs Weaver didn’t find out we were in contact again. Thankfully, Sammie had some friends who were happy to lie for her, saying she was with them all day when Weaver called. And you could be sure she would, she always wanted to know exactly where we were, who we were with and how to contact them. ‘Going to the cinema’ ended up as our usual excuse, as it gave us a reason to have our phones off. I swear she must have thought we were all massive movie enthusiasts who went to the theatre multiple times a week given how often we used that one.

I was making tons of money from the dealing too, or at least it felt like that to someone who had had a strict and very stingy allowance their entire life. Even though the amount of profit that ended up in my pocket was a minuscule amount compared to what I had sold the merchandise for, I felt like I had true financial freedom. And once I’d paid Lonnie a contribution to the bills for the apartment, it was mine to do with as I wanted. I spent it like there was no tomorrow because fuck it, there might not be. A new phone, new clothes, stuff for home… I could afford it now, for the very first time, so I had no second thoughts about buying anything.

And then there were the drugs. I had almost limitless access to them and I made damn sure to make the most of it. Kyle would come by with our stuff to sell on Monday morning and I’d pull out more than enough to keep me going for the week, then make a good start on them right away. I don’t know how Hordak managed to get his hands on it, but some of the coke he was supplying at that time was fucking incredible. It was a relatively expensive habit, but with ‘staff discount’ I was still sending back what Hordak expected of me every week, and Lonnie wasn’t exactly disappointed with how ‘excitable’ that stuff made me.

Life was fucking brilliant, and the more I enjoyed it the more it felt like I was giving Mrs Weaver the middle finger. Every night of sex with Lonnie? Fuck you, you old bitch. Every line of coke? Swivel on it, child abusing piece of shit. Every single penny in my pocket that I had worked hard for? Take another step into the fucking sea, you crusty old ballsack. They say that living well is the best revenge, and I was certainly doing that. At least, until the harsh reality of drug dealing brought me back down to earth.

It was a Friday night – the time where people want to free themselves of a stressful week and let their hair down. I would make the bulk of my money on Fridays, hanging around outside clubs and bars trying to attract business whilst simultaneously avoiding the attention of bouncers. Although there was one club where the bouncer on duty was a particularly good customer of mine, so I often spent my time outside that. I’m not sure if the customers ever knew that the guy stopping them coming in because they looked high was on more drugs than they were, but I was a big fan of the irony. And the cash.

Business was a little slow that evening, although a few of my regulars had already come to see me for their usual fix, but I was doing alright. The weather is often a factor, believe it or not, and it didn’t surprise me that the first real chill of the year had kept people at home. I got myself set up in a spot I often chose, leant on a bench in a small area of greenery that overlooked a pedestrianised square that was the town’s centre of nightlife. I was close enough to see everything going on, but just far enough away from the crowds that I didn’t attract attention by hanging around outside the door to some bar. Those that knew why I was there _knew_ why I was there and those that didn’t ignored me.

“Hey, you selling anything?” a voice from behind startled me, and I spun around to find a man standing much too close for comfort. I took a step away from him, looking him up and down to see what I was dealing with. He was remarkably average as my customers went – short bleach-blonde hair that had probably been spiked up when he left home but was now rather limp, the usual ‘lads' night out’ attire of a blue checked shirt with a couple of buttons undone and a pair of trackie bottoms. He even had the classic ‘manbag’, the strap draped across his chest like some pageant winner. The sort of person who rarely, if ever, buys drugs, which meant I could probably get away with charging him a ‘new customer premium’. Fucking jackpot!

“What’re you after?” I shrugged, a particularly deep inhalation filling my nose with cheap body spray. It was the type that every teenage boy ever smelt like after having got about four gift sets of the stuff every Christmas. Not the nicest, but it fitted his 'gigantic douche' look perfectly.

“I want everything you’ve got.”

_Oh right, here we go_. This happened every now and again, you’d get some ‘scally’ (as Lonnie called them) who thought it would be hilarious to pretend to buy up my entire stock. The first time it happened, I wasn’t aware of the fact that their main motivation was to wait for me to start unloading my backpack, then grab something and run off while I was distracted. Since then I’d been wise to it and would wait for them to front up the cash before I even entertained the idea. So far, none of them had even a tenner to show me.

“Uh huh,” I was pretty sure my eyes were rolling uncontrollably at this point, “Have you got any money?”

This was the point I expected him to walk away dejectedly, or maybe call me a bitch and make an unsuccessful grab for me. That shit happened surprisingly often. But he seemed unperturbed by my demand, reaching into his trouser pocket. I instinctively flinched, ready to make a run for it in case he pulled out a knife, but my fears were unfounded in the most astonishing way. Instead of a weapon, the guy brought out a thick roll of notes, holding it out for me to take.

“You can check them if you like. They’re real,” he spoke calmly and self-assuredly, an almost business-like manner that would have been more at home in the boardroom of some high-flying company. That wasn’t to say I didn’t sometimes get rich businessmen buying from me, they just tended to be a hell of a lot more nervous than this guy.

I quickly flicked through the money, not really being too bothered about the legitimacy of it. As long as it looked reasonably real, the Horde could treat it as genuine enough to be worth the same as the real thing. Kyle handled all of the gang’s cash, and I assumed he must have had a contact who could move counterfeits just as easily as genuine notes. In any case, I really was not going to ask too many questions – if he was about to pay for everything, I more than welcomed it.

“There’s two and a half grand there, I hope that’s enough?”

The flaring of my eyes gave away how surprised and completely out of my depth I felt. I’d never had this much money in my hands before in my life, “Uh… that’s more than enough. I should… I should give you some back.”

“No need, you keep it all,” he clasped his hand over mine as I tried to offer a handful of notes back. There was a remarkable genuineness in his expression, almost calming in a strange way; it was as if he knew exactly what I was worried about and wanted to put my mind at rest at every turn. I’m sure Lonnie would have told me not to trust him, but she wasn’t there, she couldn’t feel how at ease I was stood there in front of him.

I mumbled my thanks, swinging my backpack off my shoulder and onto the floor in front of me. As was habit now, I laughed about the Death Note logo on the front, defending myself by revealing that I was 13 when I’d bought it – I really ought to have replaced it by now, but it was a damn good rucksack. I unzipped the main pocket, stuffing the money in as though it would dissolve in the misty rain that was just starting to fall, and then began the process of unloading all my gear for him. It was all pretty well organised – Kyle made sure it came separated by type and value, so I had little difficulty in telling him what was in each bag as I passed it over.

Once our transaction was over, the man helped me back to my feet, smiling sweetly as we parted ways. He obviously had it bad for me – I mean, who wouldn’t, right? – but he was a shit-ton nicer about it than most, “It’s been a pleasure, I can’t wait for everyone to get stuck into this. And, uh, say hi to Hordak for me if you see him.”

“Wait... how do you know Hordak?” my question went ignored, the man already walking away. I knew he could hear me, the slight swagger in his quickening step confirmed it for me, but I received no answer. That said, would I even have wanted to know? Hordak was infamous for his ruthlessness, and I had heard some horrifying stories about things he had done to people who had crossed him; the people he considered as friends or even acquaintances would undoubtedly be just as bad. I was probably better off not getting involved. But regardless of what sort of criminal underworld this guy was a part of, he’d still done me a huge favour in buying everything I had. More than a huge favour, actually; I suddenly had the evening free, and I could head home and surprise Lonnie.

I hastily zipped my bag back up and set off towards the edge of town. Although I was weighed down by a couple of grand more than I’d come out with that night, there was a spring in my step as I navigated the streets back towards the estate where I lived. I could even take the rest of the weekend off and spend my time at home playing video games and getting high – I’d really landed on my feet tonight. Lonnie would be equally as impressed; she’d told me about some other people in the gang who had done some rather hefty deals, but no-one who had sold over two thousand pounds worth of gear in one go. I was about to ascend into Horde legend.

With my mind flying high with the thoughts of how amazed everyone would be, I didn’t notice the footsteps behind me until they were a couple of feet away. Startled by the sudden presence of someone so close, I wheeled around just in time to be met with the same blast of cheap body spray from the buyer earlier, quickly followed by a fist to the face. The sheer force of the punch sent me crashing to the cold, wet tarmac, a burning pain growing in my cheek and the taste of blood in my mouth from its impact. There was no let up once I was on the floor, either – a heavy boot connected with my stomach, then another stomped down on my shoulder when I tried to get up.

In between blows, I could just about manage to see that there were three men towering over me. They didn’t speak a single word between them, just the grunts of effort that accompanied their assault as pain spread through my entire body. I don’t remember how long it went on for, but I was unable to even bring my arms up to protect myself from attack. I was pretty sure one of the guys just spent his time constantly punching me in the face, maybe to try and stop me getting any view of what they looked like. By the time they eased off, I was barely holding on to consciousness, but I was still alert enough to feel them wrenching my backpack off my shoulders, pinning my arms painfully behind me to make it easier for themselves.

Once they'd got away with what they'd come for, they sprinted away, leaving me on the floor like a piece of trash. I laid on that path in the freezing cold for over an hour, drifting in and out of consciousness until the pain subsided just enough to allow me to sit up. I wasn’t sure what do – I couldn’t exactly phone the police to tell them I’d just had a bunch of money I’d made selling drugs stolen, and calling an ambulance would only bring the cops along too. Thankfully they’d left me with my phone, and although it had a huge crack down the screen and the top third no longer responded to my touch, I was just about able to get Lonnie’s number up to make the call.

It rang for an uncomfortably long time before she answered. She seemed in good spirits, at least, even if I was about to end that, “Hey babe, how are you?”

“Lonnie…” I surprised myself with how awful I sounded. My jaw could barely move, with the effect of making my words slurred, and there was clear pain in my voice that stripped it of any kind of rhythm or flow.

“Everything okay? You sound kinda… has something happened?”

Even forming the words was so painful I could scarcely talk, but I persevered through it, “Some people attacked me. They took everything.”

“Oh shit. Shit. Fucking bastard sons of bitches, if I find them I’m gonna fucking tear them limb from cunting limb,” if I wasn’t in such severe agony, I’d have found her response utterly hilarious. But no amount of swearing was going to be of any practical help; thankfully she realised the same before I had to remind her, “Shit, sorry Catra. I’m gonna come and get you, we’ll… I don’t know what we’re gonna do but you’ll be okay, I promise. Where are you?”

I had to look around to get my bearings, trying to recall the way I’d come home and how far I remembered getting, “Uh… Castle Road, I think? The little cut through opposite that house we went to a party at one time.”

“Party… oh, yep, yeah! I know where you are, I’m coming right now,” I heard her move away from the phone but her voice was still just as loud when she shouted, “KYLE! KYLE! We’ve gotta go now... No I don’t care… Well just hold it! Catra’s been attacked!... Oh Jesus fucking... seriously Kyle? I’m sorry Catra, I’ll be coming as soon as that dickhead has had a shit. Hold in there, babe.”

The phone clicked off, and I couldn’t help but let out a rather painful giggle at the conversation I’d overheard. There was something comforting about the knowledge that life was going on as normal, that Kyle was still being his usual oblivious self in the face of more pressing matters, and it made the situation seem that little bit less devastating. I tried to hold on to that normality, telling myself that everything was fine as a way of fighting the immense pain that my body was in. Every second that kept me from Lonnie, from safety, I had to constantly remind myself that help was coming just to fend off the utter despair that lying in a dark alleyway covered in bruises was trying to drown me in.

It was so quiet too, the path I was on being a small alleyway between two roads in a peaceful residential area. I doubted it even had much use in the daylight, the houses around me were huge and all had at least one car parked in their driveways; I imagined that few people round here even walked to the shops, preferring the comfort of a five-minute drive in an SUV instead. Aside from a handful of cars going past on the roads, the first sound I heard was rapid footsteps coming towards me. My heart jumped as I worried my attackers had come back to finish the job, but thankfully Lonnie’s voice shouting my name put me back at ease.

“Oh my God, Catra, shit,” she helped me to my feet, staring in horror at my face. I had imagined it didn’t look particularly great right now, but her wide-eyed, dumbstruck look was confirmation, “What the fuck happened?”

Hazy memories of the evening flickered through my mind, and I struggled to translate them into rather painful words, “Some guy, he... he bought everything – gave me cash. So I walked back home and then I got... agh, I got jumped. Should I go to hospital? I wasn’t sure if I should-”

“No, no. Too many questions. We’ll take you home and I’ll patch you up, okay?”

I nodded a response, which hurt a little less than I was expecting it to. I presumed at this point my body had been firing off chemicals to numb the pain for a while, though I was hoping Lonnie might have some other chemicals that would help too. Although seeing as these drugs had already screwed me over once tonight, that might have been a bad idea.

Once I’d got the rather painful journey in Kyle’s car over and done with, and slowly climbed the stairs up to the apartment (something that required a lot of help from them both), I made a beeline for the bed and laid down. Though I was sore, it was still quite relieving to be laying on something soft as opposed to hard concrete, and I closed my eyes, this time without worrying that I wasn’t going to wake up. I could hear Lonnie rummaging through the kitchen cupboards, and she appeared after a few minutes laden with medical supplies – cotton wool, bandages, sticking plasters, disinfectant... probably way more stuff than she actually needed. She acted like she knew what she was doing, although I knew the extent of her medical knowledge was that she once dated a student nurse for a few weeks. Still, I didn’t have any other options.

“I’m just gonna clean you up first,” her voice was so much softer than I was used to, and her manner a whole lot less intimidating. I knew her well, so she wasn’t that scary to me, but she always liked to give off the impression that she wasn’t someone to be messed with; I could see in the caring, concerned look on her face that it was a facade. She wasn’t constantly the cold-hearted, ruthless gang member she purported to be – at least not around those she genuinely cared for.

I winced as the wet cotton wool touched my face, though it was more out of the anticipation than any actual pain. Lonnie carefully dabbed at the bloodstains, drops of water sliding down my cheek as she squeezed slightly, and worked her way systematically from one side to the other. Despite the stinging when she skirted across a wound, I found the cold water rather pleasant, a welcome contrast to the fire that burned in the bruises littering my face. We stayed in silence while she finished, a deep reddish-brown staining the cotton wool when it left my skin.

“Is it bad?” I asked, not entirely certain I wanted to hear the answer. It certainly felt awful, and I imagined my face being black and blue with gaping wounds scattered across, necessitating me staying indoors and away from the eyes of the word for several weeks while my injuries healed.

Lonnie drew a sharp intake of breath, “Well it’s not the prettiest you’ve ever looked.”

I couldn’t echo her forced chuckle. It wasn’t that I found it inappropriate or insensitive – I genuinely appreciated the fact that she was trying to keep my spirits up – but the guilt of what happened was now starting to kick in. How could I have been so stupid? Alarm bells should have been ringing in my head the moment that guy handed me two grand like it was nothing, but instead there were dollar signs in my eyes obscuring all the red flags. I knew it wasn’t my fault, after all _he_ was the one who attacked me, but at the same time I should have known that this was a risky business to be involved in. I should have been more aware of my surroundings, not blindly walked down a quite alleyway with a bag full of money when someone knew I had it. Ultimately it was my own hubris and mistaken belief that I could just waltz home without thinking about it which left me vulnerable.

“I’m sorry, Lonnie.”

“Hey, hey!” she shuffled closer to give me the most precarious hug I had ever received, “It wasn’t your fault.”

I sighed, although by the end it had turned to frustrated tears, “I should have known something was up when he bought everything. Nothing good like that ever happens to me.”

“I happened to you.”

She gave me a smile that searched for reassurance as much as giving it, and I started feeling somewhat ashamed about my blanket statement. Lonnie was probably the best thing that had ever happened to me – she’d saved me from another year in the children’s home, a year I would likely have never survived. She’d given me a home, a job, a relationship, and now she was here, tending to my wounds when I needed her most. I was in a lot of pain, but it was lessened by the knowledge that I could share it, at least metaphorically, with someone who loved me. And with Lonnie by my side, I could get through anything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: probably the saddest and most gut-wrenchingly horrible chapter of the entire fic as Catra faces the consequences with Hordak


	6. Repayment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catra is summoned to Hordak's house to discuss her debt, but the night takes a harrowing turn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another chapter of me working out my own trauma on these characters, and it's dark. Also, a reminder this storyline was created around season 4 when Hordak was still a ruthless angry man.
> 
> Content warning: this chapter contains rape (used as a punishment). I do not, and could never, go into details of the act, but I do delve heavily into the feelings afterwards, and this may be somewhat triggering. If it's a difficult topic for you, or you're not sure you can stay safe whilst reading, then please skip to the next chapter. Thanks :)
> 
> There's also some drug use and a gun present as an implicit warning

Despite the limitations of Lonnie’s medical prowess, I recovered from my attack a little faster than I had anticipated. I had to spend three or four long days hidden away at home waiting for the bruising to lessen enough for me not to be stared at in public, although the largest cut across my cheek remained obvious for some time. The worst part for me was what Lonnie suspected to be a broken nose; it wasn’t just the pain that got to me, bad as it was, but the fact that I couldn’t enjoy any of our merchandise through it. I tried once, the day after the attack, and holy fuck that was a life lesson I would never forget – I was pretty sure the neighbours must have thought someone was being murdered judging from the volume and length of my scream. It was like someone had napalmed my nose.

But as the pain of the assault wore off, the worries about the money grew. I didn’t want Lonnie to worry, so I’d told her I could cover it, but I was down two grand and I had no way to make up for it. Maybe I could be a little more thrifty with my spending, but that would be a hell of a slow way to save up, and I didn’t think the Horde would say ‘sure, just give us ten quid a week for the next 5 years’. In fact, the stories I’d heard about Hordak’s attitude to debt left me cold; he was a ruthless man, of that I had little doubt, and tales of people losing fingers or even being killed only solidified my fears that I would become the next cautionary tale to new gang members.

As for why I lied to Lonnie about my ability to make up the debt, that was a more complicated issue. I’d laid in bed agonising for hours about what to tell her, and I knew she’d support me even if I’d been truthful, but it was fear that forced my hand. I didn’t want her involved if Hordak came to hunt me down; if she’d been helping me to pay off the shortfall, I knew he would make it her debt as well, and I couldn’t put her in harm’s way like that. Me, I was used to disappointing authority figures and the punishment that accompanied that, but Lonnie had always been so independent and self-sufficient. I didn’t want to jeopardise that by involving her with the what I owed, and I had no idea what Hordak would do to us once he discovered the money was missing.

I would find out a couple of weeks after the attack. It was a quiet night in the apartment, Lonnie had gone out to a party with Kyle and Rogelio whilst I stayed in, still not quite up to the idea of being around dozens of drunken people. Call me boring, call me an old woman, call me whatever, but I rather welcomed the idea of an early night without anyone around. Hell, if I had slippers, I’d have put them on and nursed a hot cocoa while watching a nature documentary on TV. That’s a lie, of course, I wasn’t _that_ lame, but I still could have done that without anybody noticing I’d suddenly aged about fifty years.

This sort of peace was something quite alien to me, although it wasn’t unpleasant. When you’ve spent most of your life in a place shared with another five or six kids of various ages plus a foster mother who didn’t know the meaning of ‘privacy’, you never really know what silence is like. Even alone in my room back there I was able to hear kids running about and talking or Mrs Weaver shouting, so I never really felt _alone_. That might sound like a good thing to some, but I always craved solitude because it was something I never had. I was an outgoing person, sure, and my friends were my lifeline, but there was something so alluring about the concept of locking myself away, miles from the nearest soul, and just existing without having to worry about anyone else. But the closest I ever got to that was heading out to the forest on the edge of town and spending an hour or two walking, passed by the occasional person doing the same. I liked it, but it was usually a bit too cold to be comfortable, and I had to return to the same chaos and commotion I had left behind.

With an empty apartment, however, I had at least five or six hours to myself. Likely more, since the chances were that Lonnie would get extremely drunk and crash out on a sofa; Kyle and Rogelio had learned that it was best to just leave her to sleep it off as she was a very uncooperative drunk – trying to move her or encourage her back home usually resulted in injury. And that meant I could make the evening my own, free from responsibility or Lonnie’s particular brand of barbed humour. I’d planned out some proper ‘me time’, kick back with a few beers and snacks, watch a shitty action movie with a self-absorbed male protagonist, then find some late-night porn channel and go to town on myself until I was sore.

I had just got myself settled on the sofa, my first beer of the night still frothing in the neck of the bottle, when I heard my phone go. It was almost certainly Lonnie, probably having a go at me for how much fun I was missing out on and how I was so boring, just in case I hadn’t got the message at any point during the previous three hours. She’d been nagging me no end to come, but I still didn’t feel quite comfortable around people I didn’t know well and I wanted to put my own safety first. Preparing a sarcastic response in my head, I unlocked my phone and opened my messages.

_Hordak, 8.02pm_

_Catra, we have something to discuss. A  
car is outside to pick you up._

Fuck. Shit. Fuck. In the five seconds it took me to read that, my heart rate felt like it had doubled, and my legs turned to jelly underneath me. Hordak had obviously discovered the discrepancy in my takings and tonight was when he had decided to take swift and ruthless revenge. I knew from the things Lonnie had told me that he wasn’t a forgiving man, and if he was angry, this could well be the last couple of hours of my life. I couldn’t exactly say that I’d had a good run – it was mostly a pile of crap – but I could take solace in the fact that I’d made it further than I thought I would. Jesus, was that really the best thing I could say about my life? That I didn’t die as soon as I expected?

Curiosity mingled with the panic, daring me to edge towards the window and peer out through the broken blinds. True to Hordak’s word, I saw a car idling in the middle of the small residents’ car park, its lights illuminating a trash-strewn hedge. It brought that extra level of reality to me – this wasn’t just some ill-advised joke, or a way of scaring me into paying up, this ‘discussion’ was going to happen and it was going to happen now.

I downed the rest of my beer in one go for courage, almost choking from the speed at which I poured it into my mouth, and hastily threw a jacket and some shoes on. Although no part of me wanted to hurry towards my inevitable demise, the thought of keeping Hordak waiting any longer that needed seemed that little bit worse. Slamming the door behind me, I flew down the stairs and out into the February night air, pushing down any worries of what was I was about to get myself into; I couldn’t change the reality, I might as well just get it over and done with.

“Good evening,” I tried faking confidence as I opened the door to the car, figuring that I should at least give off the impression of calmness despite the pandemonium of anxiety rushing around my head, “I guess you’re my ride tonight?”

I was met with stony silence from the driver, who reversed out of the parking area rather too rapidly for comfort, the wheels spinning on the loose gravel underneath. That may have been just another little scare tactic to keep me quiet on the journey, as we made our way out of the housing estate at a more appropriate pace, any attempt I tried to make at a conversation going ignored. The city at night was an oddly beautiful place, a patchwork of coloured lights illuminating the sidewalks as cars and people rushed on by. The dark shop fronts lining the main streets were interrupted by the harsh fluorescent lighting of busy takeaways with small huddles of people queuing up for whatever greasy, deep fried food was being served up. But it was not the hustle and bustle of the high street that I was heading to, my destination was a little way past it.

Candila Woods was by far the poshest part of town, its well-kept tree-lined avenues playing host to some of the largest, most expensive homes most people were ever likely to see. There was a mix of styles, too, some people choosing to keep the period features and grandeur of their older houses, whilst others had knocked them down and rebuilt with rather ill-advised modern architecture that looked well out of place. It was no surprise that an area dripping with such wealth was where Hordak had chosen to set up home.

Hordak himself had gone for the ‘demolish it and start again’ approach with the square monstrosity that was his house. I imagine the developer must have told him it would look great, thrown in a few buzzwords like ‘concept’ or ‘dynamic’, and was probably now in hiding for the awful box-shaped combination of white render and glass that it had resulted in. The frontage was dominated by a huge blue-tinted window that spanned the entire height of the building to show off the staircase, as if that was an important feature that needed highlighting, while either side of it an odd mix of round and square windows looked into various rooms. And as for who decided that green was the best shade for the exterior lighting, I wouldn’t know, but I’d bet money local kids admired it on Halloween.

I’d been here a couple of times before, under slightly less terrifying circumstances, so I was familiar with the rough layout of the house, as well as the rather oppressive décor inside. It was almost certainly another subtle way to assert his dominance, but the entrance hallway was spartan and dimly lit and felt a lot more claustrophobic than it actually was. I found it impressive, really, the way Hordak had taken what should have been an airy modern space and turned it into something reminiscent of a nightmare. On previous visits, it made me slightly intimidated; this time round I was barely able to catch my breath from panic.

I was shaking with nerves when I walked through the door to his office, the elaborate faux-Victorian decoration and overly-bright white lighting inside in great contrast to where I had just come from. I genuinely expected Hordak to shoot me dead right there and then, and the look on his face only backed that up. He stared uncomfortably at me, looking me directly in the eye each time I dared to glance up at him, and his expression oozed with anger.

There was a man I hadn’t seen before stood off to the side, too. A smarmy-looking guy in a suit, quite a bit older than Hordak himself, with long blonde hair down to his chest. The way he silently peered down his sharp nose, gazing up and down my body, sent a shiver down my spine. I glanced between him and Hordak, who pointedly ran his hand along the gun on the desk to remind me to stay in line and forget about trying anything.

“Catra, do you have my money?” Hordak was disarmingly calm, though I knew that at any moment his temper could erupt in an explosion of violence. I’d heard many tales of people being assaulted or even shot by him when he was angry.

It was taking all my effort not to break down into tears of abject terror and fall to the floor to beg him not to kill me. But I held my cool as I responded, “I… uh, I don’t. Not yet.”

“Oh, Catra, that’s not the answer I wanted to hear.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” I began to protest, hoping that he might find the story of the attack a legitimate reason for my being short with the money. Maybe he’d see it as an attack on him or his operation and change the focus of his anger to the true villain in the tale, the man who actually stole the money, and say something like ‘I will sort him out for you and get my money from him’. Or maybe he might relent and just break my legs or something, that would be preferable to death.

“Don’t worry, Catra,” the smirk on his face told me to do the exact opposite, “I’d like you to introduce you to a friend of mine – more like a mentor, a big brother in a way. This is Mr Prime.”

_Mr Prime?_ What was this, some two-bit gangster movie where the characters came up with the most awful code names they could? Trust me, if I could have done it without immediately being shouted down by two men, I’d have laughed out loud at the name. Fucking ‘Mr Prime’, Jesus…

Hordak continued, each word laden with more malice than the one before, “My friend here will happily pay me to use you – the amount of the debt and more.”

I squinted, confused at his turn of phrase, “What do you mean ‘use’?”

“You’re a pretty young thing, Catra. I’m sure you won’t mind giving him a taste.”

Wow. He wanted to whore me out for money. I might have been desperate but, fuck, I still had standards, “No, I’m not doing that.”

“What makes you think you’ve got a choice? You have a debt, and I am allowing you to repay that debt,” Hordak waved a hand towards me, prompting this Prime guy to start coming over to me. I instinctively began to take a step back, but the door behind me left me with nowhere to go.

Prime laid a hand on my cheek, moving my head around like a jeweller examining a diamond, checking for minor imperfections. His eyes bore through me, making me self-conscious of every blemish on my skin. When he finally spoke, his voice was more chilling that even Hordak’s. It was cool, self-assured, but with a deep foreboding behind it, “This one is so understatedly pretty, but I feel so much pain in her. She’s troubled by something. Maybe I could fix her for you? I trust this one will last me longer than before?”

I trembled under his grip, as angry as I was petrified. Fuck him, treating me like some kind of toy, like the women Hordak laid before him were just little pet projects for Prime to do with as he pleased. Though I knew it was a foolish idea to do so, the way I was being treated fuelled my fury and it spilled over into words, “Fuck you.”

I could see the moment that both of them realised I’d not been a good little whore and kept my mouth shut. The sheer surprise, the raised eyebrows and gormless looks painted over their faces for a few moments, which gave way a second later to rage and indignation. How dare I stand up for myself, right? Hordak rose to his feet, gun in hand, and I expected him to charge across the room to me and start beating me to a bloody pulp with it, but Prime gave him a signal to stand down, and he obeyed.

“I’m sorry?” Prime’s voice remained composed, showing no sign of being affected by the antagonistic comment I’d made, “I could have sworn you said something _very_ unbecoming of a lady, even one in your position.”

I was too far gone to backtrack. What good could it have possibly done now? For years, I’d cultivated a reputation as the bad kid, the mouthy, scary one that you avoided if you knew what was good for you. People knew who I was, and they either wanted to befriend me or they avoided me; but now that counted for nothing. To the man in front of me, I was nothing, little more than a sex doll, and I couldn’t talk my way out this time. That didn’t stop me from trying though.

“I said fuck you.”

I saw the fire rise in his eyes, the moment his temper reached its breaking point. He threw me hard against the wall, my right shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, “QUIET! Shut up and fulfil your purpose, you rude little bitch!”

I know I screamed, I must have done, since I remember a hand clamping down over my mouth. I should have bitten him, I should have punched him in his face, but I just stood there. I didn’t move – I couldn’t. All I remember is thinking about this geography textbook I had used in school for a couple of years, and how one page showed these mountains in Scotland. We spent weeks doing a project on it, I forget what now, but it was something to do with fault lines or tectonic plates, and I had that page open a lot. I used to daydream about running away there, somewhere remote and far from this horrible city with its abusive foster carers, drug lords and their shitty friends.

I did that again, right there in that room. I closed my eyes and imagined myself sat on a train on a frosty but bright morning, surrounded by all my belongings, staring out at the breath-taking landscape unspoilt by humanity, where mountains disappeared into the clouds and valleys ran for miles towards the horizon. It was just me in the carriage, and there was this incredible sense of peace and tranquillity that I would never have been able to find anywhere in Etheria. I opened the window and listened to the wind rushing by as we threaded our way through pristine countryside with an almost-deserted road running alongside as our only company.

The serenity of the world around me only grew as I imagined stepping off onto the gravel platform at an immaculately kept station. In my mind, a small group of dedicated volunteers worked tirelessly to make it look as though it was straight out of times past, like they’d made this tiny remote station a bubble of a bygone age. An age where life was simpler, when people saw only beauty in the world around them, and when the horrors of a criminal underworld were confined to the pages of the books in the waiting room. And sure, all this may have been just my imagination, but it worked – I felt calm, like there was nothing wrong and I could relax. I couldn’t get hurt in that world.

By the time I came out of my head, and back into the room, Prime was stood back beside Hordak. I was slumped against the base of the wall, half naked with my jeans around my ankles. My t-shirt was ripped at the bottom, exposing a patch of skin now covered in marks from where I assumed he had gripped me while… while… shit. I couldn’t even bear to think about the word.

“You may go,” Hordak said with a slight nod of his head in my direction. I tried to get back to my feet, but they gave way underneath me, which only angered him, “I SAID GO!”

I had to crawl out of that room; my legs just wouldn’t support me. In the hallway I got my phone from my pocket to call Lonnie, but my hands were trembling so much I couldn’t keep the screen steady enough to even unlock it. All I could do was drag myself across the bare wood of the floor, feeling a pressure behind my eyes that came with needing to cry but the shock rendering me unable to shed even a single tear.

It took me five minutes to haul my body that short distance out of the house, it felt so much heavier with the weight of what had happened, and I practically threw myself into the open door of the waiting car. Had I given it any thought, I might have realised that it was not the best idea to get into a vehicle that was, essentially, under Hordak’s control, but I had to get out of there. I had to get as far away from that house as quickly as possible, and the car that brought me here, with its silent driver, was my best chance at that.

The journey passed in a blur, flashes of what had happened entering my consciousness as I battled to keep them away. I don’t remember the route, or how long it took, or anything about the car, just the desperation of trying to get that man’s grinning face out of my mind. When we arrived back at mine, I leapt out of the car, stumbling on the ground below in my haste to get to the safety of my apartment. I don’t think I even shut the door, but I was in no frame of mind to consider good passenger etiquette.

I could finally breathe again once I was inside, the door locked safely behind me. There was a comforting familiarity of the smell of our apartment, mostly stale weed smoke and burnt grease from the oven as well as the fresher odour of our attempts to clean the place. But this time, the reassurance of the scent of home was tainted by something worse. I could smell Prime’s aftershave on myself, a sickly-sweet aroma that seemed to stick to my clothes and my skin, and the more I tried to ignore it, the more intense it became.

“Get the fuck off me!” I wasn’t sure why I yelled that out loud, it wasn’t as though the smell would listen and immediately vanish, taking away the mark he had left on me. There was something I could easily take off myself, however – my clothes – and I ripped away every last shred of fabric that had been defiled by Prime’s disgusting hands. I couldn’t stomach the idea of ever being able to wash him out of them, and rather than the laundry basket, I kicked the lid off the kitchen bin and stuffed them inside. I’d take the bag out as soon as I could, but I needed to cleanse myself of Prime before I thought about any of that.

The shower in our apartment was, for want of a better word, shit. It was just a hose attached to the faucet of the bath, which meant that we had to pre-heat the water for about half an hour first to avoid being drenched in freezing cold water. But there was too much urgency in my need to wash every last trace of him off my body to wait even a second longer, and I slammed the bathroom door behind me as I made for what I hoped would be the blessed relief of running water. I didn’t care that it was like ice, I could barely feel anything anyway, I just needed every atom of Prime to leave my skin and wash away into the sewer where it belonged.

It was only when I was under the freezing spray that I allowed myself to look down at my body, though to what extent it was still mine, I couldn’t be sure. The skin on my thighs, soft and pale, was etched with the memory of his bony hands forcefully seeking to take what was not his; the scratches on my arms, remnants of my futile struggling, would fade only visually. They would never forget what caused them. None of it, not a single inch of skin or hair or nail, felt like it belonged to me now. My body, only recently reclaimed as my own, had Prime’s name written over it in an ink I could never remove.

I felt my legs give way under me, and I fell to the base of the bathtub, howling my cries of despair through the tightness of my throat. Cold water drenched my hair, running down my face and taking with it what little warmth was held in the tears I wept. I had to close my eyes after a while, even looking at the places he had touched replayed the memories embedded within my flesh and reset whatever distance from Prime I had thought I’d found. And that was how I stayed for an hour, sobbing uncontrollably in the dark underneath a cascade of ice cold water and coming to terms with the realisation that I would never be able to wash this memory from my body or my mind. I could never return to a time before him, before he…

Eventually I gathered enough wherewithal to move, shivering from the cold that I had subjected myself to. It probably wasn’t that good for me to sit with icy water falling on me for over an hour, but I didn’t care, it wasn’t as though I wanted to look after my body now. I began rifling through my chest of drawers for something, anything, to wear and cover up the skin which Prime had had his hands all over. I knew it was akin to painting over a crack in a wall – it didn’t fix anything, but at least there would be less of me on display to look at, to stoke those memories.

I found a pair of pyjamas that would do me for tonight, in the unlikely event that I managed to get to sleep without flashbacks of Prime towering over me, of the weight of his body on top of me, of the look on his face as he took what didn’t belong to him. But in the drawer next to them, I found something else that sparked an idea, maybe even a little hope: my drugs. Kyle had delivered it before Hordak had found out about the missing money, and I’d not been out to sell any of it yet, which meant I had a couple of grand’s worth of drugs sitting in front of me. I could have whatever I wanted.

Lonnie encouraged me to sample a little of most of the stuff we sold, but she had always warned me off heroin. It was a bottomless pit, she said, it was more addictive than anything else, it took over everything, it was life-destroying. Well fuck it, my life had already been destroyed, what could happen that was worse? Besides, those I sold it to were always singing its praises, and they weren’t exactly zombies living in a crack den; one buyer was a high-flying businessman, we always met on his way home from work and he was wearing a suit. A fucking suit! Life destroying my ass. And I would be careful anyway, just like I was with everything else Lonnie and I took.

I didn’t have any needles lying around the house, but I’d seen enough people in the same position to know what to do. According to them, there were other ways to get it around your system quickly if you couldn’t inject. And fuck me did I need to get it done quickly. I needed to put even a temporary stop to the flashbacks, to the feeling of his hands roaming over my body that was playing on repeat in my mind. This, I was sure, could do it, and I didn’t think it would matter if I took just a tiny amount of this supposedly-miraculous brown powder. It was only about five bucks’ worth, I could easily make that up.

I felt nothing at first, no difference to the devastated ruins of my consciousness, not even that warmth that I got when I could feel a drug rushing to my brain, springing it from its prison of everyday life. It was disappointing, and I almost cried upon the thought of not being able to shift the night’s events from memory, but then I felt it. It crept up on me slowly, a serenity dawning like the most beautiful of summer mornings that left me not with a rush of joy like cocaine, but with a mellow contentedness, almost an insulation from my own thoughts. A pleasant feeling, and welcome relief from what had happened, but hardly the miracle that people made it out to be. Heroin did what I needed it to, but it was underwhelming to say the least.

One thing in its favour was the lack of comedown the following morning. I awoke with the tail end of that pleasantness, that layer of protection from my own thoughts, and that was all. No crashing headache, no depression or regret, just the same serenity as the night before. And that was where the drug showed its true benefit to me: I wasn’t hampered by the repercussions of the trauma I’d been through, nor by any after-effects of any drugs I might otherwise have taken. With heroin, it wasn’t euphoria that I found, it was something altogether better, something more useful – I had found a way to erase that night. I had happiness. There were no disadvantages, it hadn’t fucked me up and I could actually face the day like I normally would.

And all that from just £5 worth? This was affordable, even for someone like me who now needed to be really bloody careful about making sure Hordak got every single penny. Besides, with just a little heroin every few days, I could probably face anything the world threw at me and regain control of my own life. God knows I had to get it back somehow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Catra continues to combat her trauma with drugs, and it causes issues between her and Lonnie


	7. Coping

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catra's way of dealing with Prime's assault begins to take its toll on her relationship

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's just the beginning of the slippery slope for Catra...
> 
> Note: this chapter contains drug use and a violent confrontation between two people in a relationship  
> Also to note: I've very little experience with drugs, so some of the references to it might not be 100% accurate. I have done some research for this fic, so it's not completely plucked from thin air, but there may be some stuff that isn't realistic.

“Almost ready to go, Catra?” Lonnie’s voice travelled into the bedroom where I lay staring at the ceiling. Rogelio had invited a few people round for a party that evening, and I’d been co-opted into going despite not having much desire to go out.

“Meh,” I shouted back with disinterest. It wasn’t that I hated the idea of being at Rogelio’s with everyone, but being at home on my own was far more enticing. Or, more accurately, I _needed_ to be alone.

In the weeks since I’d met with Hordak, things had been going brilliantly for me – it was as though that night had never happened, because thanks to my new favourite drug, it might as well have been some screwed-up dream. Where, that night, I looked down at my body and saw Mr Prime’s indelible fingerprints, now I could look down and see the beauty in my soft skin, the perfection of every freckle and mark. That was how people dealt with being sexually assaulted, right? They had to learn to love their body and see it as their own again, and I’d managed that in days with a few quids’ worth of drugs. Who needed a counsellor? Life was beautiful.

But solitude became important to me thanks to the secrecy it provided. I could easily hide taking a small amount of the stuff every few days, but it didn’t stay that way. Nobody had warned me about how rapidly I would build up a tolerance to the heroin – not that I had actually told anyone about it. I knew Lonnie would judge me and try and get me to stop, forcing me to return to the horrors of life without it, so I tried to be as secretive as I could. I would normally wait until she went out to dig out my little tin from underneath a pile of sweaters in the bottom drawer of my dresser and ensure that any needles and other paraphernalia went back in before she returned. That was why I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the idea of going out somewhere I couldn’t shoot up with the source of my recent happiness.

But the aforementioned tolerance threatened that happiness. The small amount I’d taken initially, that gave me that perfect balance of contentedness began to seem increasingly inadequate. Not that supply was a problem – Kyle delivered way more than I could ever need each week, and I was under no obligation to sell a certain amount rather than keep it for myself as long as I paid for it. But paying had rapidly become the issue. I could afford £5 every few days, but I quickly needed £10 worth, then £15, then £20. And the more I kept for myself, the less I had to sell to make the money I needed to afford it. I could have stopped, but my happiness would have gone with it – and I absolutely couldn’t let myself return to the despair I felt. Each time I felt it creeping up I was always terrified that this would be the time I couldn’t be able to keep it at bay.

I just about managed, but it was beginning to cost me more than I could give, and not just in terms of money. Already struggling to find the cash to make up for the stock of my own that I was taking lest I find myself in Hordak’s office again, desperation led me to find more creative ways to keep myself sane. I knew Lonnie had some, and I figured she would be able to make up a little shortfall here and there – she’d barely notice, I told myself. She was doing fine for money, and I imagined she would simply assume she’d been a bit careless and miscounted or something. No-one would be hurt by it – I would keep myself on the level, and she would be at worst a few pounds down.

But I couldn’t stop the remorse that came with stealing from her – she was my girlfriend, and I was betraying the trust she put in me. With that guilt came an even bigger need to stop it, though, and it became a horrible cycle: I felt guilty for stealing, but I stole to stop the guilt. And, though I abhorred the idea of ever admitting it, I was beginning to feel that this was something falling out my control.

“What’s with you lately?” Lonnie appeared in the bedroom doorway, concern plastered across her face, “You never want to do anything with me.”

I sighed with frustration, knowing that she wasn’t going to give up easily. She was Lonnie, she never did, and normally I admired that, but this time it wasn't something I relished coming up against, “I’ve just been tired. Another time, maybe.”

“For fuck’s sake Catra, if you don’t want to be with me anymore, just say.”

“Oh, come on,” my voice was almost a growl. Of course I still wanted to be with her, she _knew_ I still wanted to be with her and it was pretty low of her to suggest otherwise, “It’s not like that.”

Lonnie’s expression changed ever so slightly, but it was enough to communicate that she was getting angrier, “Well what _is_ it like, Catra? Because you never want to spend time with me or go out together.”

I found myself standing up before I really knew why I was doing it. Something unspoken inside me must have realised, rather reluctantly, that she was right, and I had been neglecting our relationship in favour of seeking happiness in the drugs, or maybe it was the guilt of taking from Lonnie. Whatever it was, I felt as though I couldn’t reject her this time, even though part of me was already screaming internally about foregoing another hit of liquid calmness.

The battle raged internally as we walked across the estate together. I was torn between two beacons of happiness, with Lonnie, my girlfriend, the person to whom I owed every bit of liberty and safety I now had, on one side. The other side was heroin, the chemical that I needed to stop myself falling down the slippery slope that Hordak and Prime had pushed me down on that night, six weeks ago. Without either, I knew I would fail, I would be utterly crushed by sadness, but I found myself feeling increasingly like I was going to have to make the impossible choice of one or the other. And that scared the hell out of me.

Rogelio lived with his brother on the other side of the estate in a crumbling semi-detached house that looked as though half of it was about to collapse at any given moment. The front garden seemed to be used as a garage, playing home to three cars in various states of repair, none of which seemed to be driveable thanks to a lack of wheels. Honestly, the whole place looked like a dump and the only possible improvement he could make would be to tear it down. But I wasn’t going to tell him that, the guy was fucking terrifying.

“Hey bitches!” Lonnie called as she opened the door. We were close enough that we didn’t need to knock or wait to be invited into Rogelio’s place, and he left the door unlocked pretty much all the time – which, given the area, was either stupidity or one hell of a power play.

I followed Lonnie into the living room where a good dozen or so people, most of whom I didn’t know, were already sat drinking and smoking. I assumed they were other Horde members, as I vaguely recalled seeing them at my initiation, but having so many of them in one place, occupying every piece of furniture Rogelio had, was quite intimidating. Thankfully, Kyle was the first to notice us, and he leapt from the arm of the sofa he was perched on.

“Hey, you two!” he always sounded so excited to see us, it was like coming home to a puppy we’d left on its own for hours. Kyle, presumably, wouldn’t have taken a protest shit on the carpet, but you never knew with him, “We’ve been waiting for you, although… I thought you’d at least bring some beer.”

Lonnie looked somewhat dejected, “Been a tough week, I could have sworn I was missing some gear. Had to make up the shortfall instead of paying for your drinks.”

A chill ran through my body at hearing that she had noticed the missing drugs, my fist clenching on reflex. And worse than the fact that she’d discovered that they were vanishing from her stash, it was having a real impact on her to the extent that she was losing out financially. That was my fault, I was the one hurting her like that. But I couldn’t exactly come clean, especially not here in a house with ten giant men who knew Lonnie far better than they knew me.

“Gonna have to work on your sales technique,” I laughed much more than I needed to, regretting having said anything at all. I’d wanted to come across as funny, give Lonnie that same kind of slightly sarcastic humour that she gave to everyone else, but my tone was harsher, like I was being deliberately rude.

She gave me a look of disbelief, responding instantly, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I shrugged.

“No. You said something, I want to know what you meant by it.”

A dozen pair of eyes were on us now, Lonnie’s voice growing louder and higher in pitch as her anger rose. I knew I’d spoken out of turn, a throwaway comment, but it had riled her and she seemed determined to pick a fight. 

“Just saying that you would need to sell more to get more money. You know, normal stuff. I didn’t mean anything bad.”

Lonnie moved into the room with a low growl, taking the spot Kyle had vacated, and rolled her eyes dramatically, “Go home Catra. Just fucking go home.”

“I’m here now, I should-” 

“No! It’s clear you don’t want to be around me so just go home and let me enjoy my night.”

While I hated the thought of Lonnie being annoyed with me, I wasn’t exactly resisting the idea that I might soon be able to be home on my own. Even the fact that we’d just had a row in front of our friends didn’t seem so bad in the face of the knowledge that I could make it all become insignificant with just one hit of the heroin I needed. I didn’t argue any further, just nodded my head in silence, turned around and left.

I got my kit out the second I arrived back home. It was rapidly becoming second nature to me now, the measuring out, dissolving the powder, heating the solution, drawing it up into the syringe and finally letting it infuse into my body. I loved how instant the relief was, a psychosomatic feeling of peace bridging the minutes before a more powerful, chemical one took its place. My worries, my negative thoughts, they all melted away leaving me with a sense of perfect contentment, that feeling I had needed for hours. My happiness had returned to me.

With my thoughts restrained once again, I let myself relax. After the time I’d had over the last few weeks, I knew I had earnt the chance to rest, and didn’t imagine anyone would begrudge it. I stopped worrying about Lonnie – hell, I _couldn’t_ worry, my brain was incapable now – assuming it would all work out for the best, and laid myself down on the sofa for an easy night in. It was perfect: just me, some old cartoon on the TV that I didn’t have to pay too much attention to, and an all-encompassing feeling of peace that would last me a few hours.

Sadly, I would not get that few hours’ worth of peace, as a short time later I heard a key turn in the lock, quickly followed by the door slamming shut. Lonnie was home, and whilst normally I’d have got up to greet her, the tiredness I was feeling made opening my eyes the most effort I was willing to put in. But I could tell from the moment she stormed into the room that she was still pretty angry with me, it was as though there was an aura of rage emanating from her steely stare.

“Catra, we need to talk,” there was no ‘hello’ or ‘how are you’, and her tone was just as serious as her expression.

I wasn’t in the mood for it though, “Busy.”

“I wasn’t asking. We’re talking, now,” she moved further into the room and calmly removed the TV plug from the socket, then stood over me, her face glaring, “Some of my gear has been going missing this last week, and I couldn’t work out why. I thought maybe I was just being careless or that I’d added up my takings wrong, but I double checked with Kyle and I definitely got it right. So then I wondered, ‘how could a hundred quid’s worth of heroin go missing?’ because I keep everything hidden away when I’m not out selling. You want to weigh in on this, Catra? Maybe you could tell me what’s happened to it, why I’m down on money?”

Honestly, I knew this was coming. I had tried to hide what I was doing as much as possible, but in an operation like the Horde where everyone knows exactly how much they should have down to the last fraction of an ounce, any amount of heroin I was stealing from her wasn’t going to go unnoticed. My hope that she wouldn’t know it was me had proven largely pointless given that there wasn’t really anybody else close enough to her to know where she kept her stash. There was Kyle, I guess, but I mean… come on, _fucking Kyle?_

Even so, I was going to try and play innocent. I didn’t need some big confrontation messing things up and trying to take my happiness away, “I dunno.”

“I know you took it.”

“Took what? I haven’t taken shit.”

“Don’t…” she shook her head dismissively. I was both impressed and worried by how calm she was, but I knew it was often the precursor to rage, “Don’t lie to me Catra. I’ve been having to pay Hordak out of my own money for the heroin and I can’t do it anymore. Give me the money and we’re fine.”

“I didn’t take it, Lonnie.”

“You fucking did!” there it was, the first moment of anger in her raised voice. I could feel the tension in the air, knew there was more to come, but I had no idea how to answer her. Admitting what I’d done seemed like a bad option, and meeting her anger would only escalate things, so I simply stayed quiet, staring at the blank TV screen.

But silence only served to irritate her. Without any time for me to react, she snatched at my arm, pulling me onto the floor, “Don’t fucking ignore me, Catra!”

When she gripped my arm, something snapped inside me, and I saw red. I felt the adrenaline coursing around my body as my mind responded not to Lonnie pulling me off a sofa, but of Mrs Weaver using the exact same grip to throw me around the children’s home. I couldn’t stop myself; it was as though the mere act of someone holding my wrist was all it took for me to for my mind to prepare for a fight.

“What the shit did you do that for?!” I yelled, scrambling back to my feet. We were eye-to-eye, pure rage burning behind them, and it became a competition to see who would back down first. Both of us stood there, the only sound in the room from our breathing through gritted teeth, until Lonnie finally conceded, taking a step away.

“I’m going to ask you nicely, one more time,” she was back to the worryingly cool, quiet tone. It didn’t last, however, “You stole from me Catra, and I want you to PAY! FUCK!”

“I don’t owe you anything!”

I could see she had little patience left for me, but I only felt indignation at that. She was my girlfriend; she was supposed to support me with my problems so we could face them together – not start yelling at me. I didn’t want to get into an argument, didn’t want to destabilise the contentment I had with life lately, and of all the people to try and do that, it hurt that Lonnie was the one. She was trying to sabotage me and tear me down from the happiness I had finally found.

“STOP FUCKING LYING!” Lonnie’s frustration was growing with every denial, but there was a righteousness to my anger now. It was completely unwarranted, sure, but with my brain unwaveringly telling me I was in danger from Mrs Weaver, I had to stand my ground. I couldn’t let myself be taken advantage of by anyone else, not her, not Hordak’s asshole friends, not Weaver, and that determination made me lose sight of everything else.

“I haven’t taken shit,” I spat, starting to believe my own lie by this point, “Go fuck yourself.”

She almost choked on her disbelief, “Fuck myself? Someone has to, because you’re shit at it. You’re just a pity fuck, Catra, I felt sorry for you. Not like I would have touched a kid like you otherwise.”

Her words shattered through every bit of confidence I had. _A kid._ That’s all I was to her, that’s all I was to Prime, to Mrs Weaver… just a stupid kid who doesn’t know what she’s doing, and maybe that was all I’d ever be. ‘Troubled’, they always said, and that was bullshit-speak for ‘we don’t know what to do with her, she’s not our problem’. An easy get-out-of-jail card for adults who couldn’t give a shit about me, who didn’t care about protecting me from harm. Well fuck being a kid. Fuck all of them, I wasn’t going to let people look down on me like that anymore. Lonnie was just like the rest of them, a horrible person who never cared for me one bit, and I’d make sure she knew it.

If I’d been thinking more clearly, I would have stopped myself before escalating things further. I would have kept my hands by my side rather than letting them search for the nearest object. I’d have left the empty beer bottle on the coffee table. But rage was ruling me, casting aside considered actions for angry impulses and desires for revenge. My focus was on how strongly I gripped the neck of the bottle, not on whether I was about to make a huge mistake, and it had left my hand before I even realised that I’d thrown it.

“SHIT!” Lonnie yelled with surprise more than anger as she managed to move her head out of the path of the bottle before it hit her. The glass sailed through the air, smashing on the wall behind with fragments exploding out in all directions. I even felt a tiny shard land on my still-outstretched hand, so I must have launched it at her with a lot of force.

The realisation of what I had done hit me like a freight train, and I was frozen in place as I struggled to make sense of my own actions, “I… I… Lonnie, I’m…”

“Get out,” she said solemnly, her eyes burning through me with a fury I’d never seen in her before.

“I’m sorry!”

“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE!” she erupted in a scream, kicking the coffee table over to clear a path to me and marching over with indignation. One hand gripped my right wrist, her nails digging into my skin, whilst the other clasped my left shoulder, giving her leverage to push me towards the door. I tried to stand fast, but Lonnie had always been incredibly strong for her size and was easily able to overpower me.

I stumbled, my ribs landing hard on the corner of a chair, and fell to the floor, but it was not going to deter Lonnie from trying to get me out. She wrenched my arm up and started dragging me across the room, the carpet burning my lower back with friction. There was nothing but an angry determination in her eyes, nothing of the loving girlfriend I usually saw in her that I could appeal to.

“Stop! I’m sorry!” I begged, tears of desperation coming to my eyes as i tried unsuccessfully to wrest myself from her grip. Though I hoped I was saying this out of genuine remorse, I didn’t dare to entertain the fact that she was about to kick me out meant that I would be isolated from the drugs I needed.

“No, you are fucking not!” Lonnie wouldn’t even look at me. She kept dragging me until we reached the front door of the apartment, before roughly pulling me back up to my feet and pinning me against the wall with one arm whilst opening the door with the other, “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE! GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE!”

I felt myself beginning to break down. This was my home, my girlfriend, everything, and it was all about to be torn away from me. It had been eight months since I had escaped from Mrs Weaver’s, and I’d built a proper life for myself here, now one mistake was going to erase everything. I had nowhere to go, and the only place that I could even think of was the children’s home, somewhere that I had sworn I’d never set foot in again. The hopelessness of my situation began to hit hard.

“Lonnie, please…I-I’m sorry!” my voice was breaking, with tearful stutters encroaching upon my words, “Please d… don’t do this.”

She didn’t even give me the courtesy of an answer, just one final shove outside and a slam of the door to complete the job. Everything ended here, on the filthy tiled floor of a dilapidated council block on a shitty estate in a mediocre town. Mrs Weaver had always told me I would amount to nothing, that I’d fail miserably away from here and end up dead in a gutter before I was 25. It was beginning to look like she was right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Catra's out on the streets... how will she manage?


	8. A Night on the Street

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After being kicked out by Lonnie, Catra has to face a night alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The usual warnings apply for drugs, plus a character is told in anger to kill themselves.
> 
> Enjoy!

The dirt-encrusted tiles on the floor of the hallway were surprisingly cold for the time of year, sapping the heat from my hands as I hauled myself back to my feet. I hammered on the door in the hope that Lonnie might have reconsidered in the seconds since she had physically thrown me out, desperation driving my fists so hard that I left a dent in the thin wood, “LONNIE! Let me in!”

There was no answer, but I could hear her rapid breathing through the gaps around the wood. It sounded like she was leant against the door, and I prayed that it was remorse keeping her there, “Lonnie, I know you’re there. I’ve got nothing, let me back in, please…”

“Go away, Catra.”

At least she had acknowledged my existence, which felt like a step closer to getting back inside. I had to choose my words carefully to avoid angering her, and I hoped that laying out my situation would appeal to her better nature, “Please Lonnie, I have nowhere else to go. What am I supposed to do?”

“What are you supposed to do?” her indignant tone crushed what little hope I had that she would relent, “I’ll tell you what you can do, Catra. You can get your lying, junkie ass out of this building, then go jump in front of a fucking train. Do the world a fucking favour and kill yourself, because I don’t give a flying shit anymore.”

I never thought I’d hear anything like that from Lonnie. She had always been on my side, my partner in crime both literally and metaphorically, from the first time we’d met in the food court of a busy shopping centre one afternoon. I was introduced by a friend from school… well, one of the people I hung out with when I was skipping school, at least; he knew a guy who had a brother who knew someone who knew Lonnie, it was that sort of thing. I mentioned that I felt bad about never bringing any weed because I had no idea where to get it, and after laughing at my apparent innocence (an opinion I did not share, not after the shit I’d been through), he gave me her number.

We got on fantastically well from the first ‘alright?’. Our minds both worked in the same way, we had a similar sense of humour and a shared history of being let down by people who were supposed to be looking out for us. While she stayed vague about her own life, within a couple of hours of first meeting I was pouring my soul out to her. And unlike most people I knew, Lonnie didn’t recoil in horror or start a moral crusade to ‘fix’ my life; she simply placed a hand on my shoulder and said “that’s fucked up”.

_That’s fucked up._ Three simple words but ones I’d never heard before, neither in those terms nor in less informal ones. People were quick to judge me, to discard me as beyond help or take one look at me and assume I was just trying to get attention. But Lonnie did none of that, she saw beyond the teenager who pretended school was pointless but stayed away from it because she was tired of failing. She saw beyond the kid who had lied about her bruises so much that she started to believe herself she really _was_ that clumsy. Beyond the girl who had been told ‘I can’t do anything for you, you just need to behave’ by a psychologist who she’d barely spent 30 minutes with. Lonnie took what I said and reacted with a compassion I hadn’t received from anyone bar Sammie. I’d certainly never felt that kind of validation from someone my age.

From there on out, she became my best friend. We’d spend our weekends and school holidays in town, and I’m pretty sure she got up especially early so that we could have as much time together hanging around the shopping centre before Mrs Weaver’s curfew hit. On schooldays she would often come up to the Crimson Rec and hang out with me and the other kids who were bunking off, saving us the best of her weed. That’s friendship, right?

But it had come to nothing. Ruined by a moment of madness. I wasn’t thinking about… well, about anything, when I picked up that bottle. It was as though something else had taken over in that split-second, something that had forgotten about what an essential part of my life Lonnie was, and though I didn’t want to admit what that ‘something’ was, I already knew the cause. I understood what she meant by ‘life-destroying’ painfully well now, because I was fairly sure I’d just destroyed mine. The only saving grace was that she had ducked out of the way; if I’d hit her… shit, it didn’t bear thinking about.

The future had suddenly become a much scarier place. My life revolved around Lonnie – she was my girlfriend, this was my home – and the idea that I would lose that began to open up a huge hole in my life. It felt like I wasn’t anyone if I wasn’t with Lonnie, that everything about who I was depended on her and I was barely a person if I didn’t have her. I had pretty much defined myself in terms of her, and now she didn’t want me, I was nothing.

Given that it was clear she wasn’t going to relent, I trudged down the stairs and out into the evening. I was grateful that it was the end of July and the weather was warm enough to walk the streets in a t-shirt and leggings – I didn’t even have time to put my shoes on, only a pair of black and blue striped socks saving me from being barefoot. Everything I had was in that apartment, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to get it back. So, what the hell was I going to do now? Where was I going to go?

I just kept walking, head down and insulated from the world around me by my despair. A despair that I had not seen for weeks, one whose shadow creeped over me more with every step, and which I had gone to great lengths to avoid. It felt like the world was crumbling around me, a creeping wilderness that sapped every iota of familiarity this town held. But I couldn’t outrun this desolation, not on my own – I needed a fix of the one thing that could help me, and I needed it now.

Getting money from begging is slightly easier when you’re a young woman who looks like she’s barely old enough to be out at night. I didn’t even have to twist the truth too much, I just put on my best ‘I’m desperate’ voice (which, to be fair, I was) and asked passers-by if they could spare any money to help me find a bed for the night. It wasn’t entirely a lie, I _did_ need to find somewhere to stay tonight, but with the negative feelings and thoughts beginning to swirl in my head, all I cared about was how I could get hold of more of the drug I needed. Once I was feeling okay again, then I could turn my attention to finding shelter.

But asking strangers for money yielded little success. A couple of people dropped me a few pounds each, taking pity on a poor homeless young woman who needed protection from the horrible world outside, whilst a few others spared whatever small coins they could get out of their pockets in order to shut me up. Most people flat out ignored me, presumably living in a world that was much better if those like me simply didn’t exist – if you don’t see it, it’s not happening right?

After an hour of wandering aimlessly round the town centre begging, I still had barely ten pounds to my name, and that was not going to be enough to cope with getting kicked out by Lonnie. I needed a way to get more cash a lot faster, and it was ironically one of the unwanted memories of that night in Hordak’s office that provided me with the solution. “You’re a pretty young thing,” he’d said, shortly before being paid a lot of money to have me raped. I still felt sick at the thought of Prime’s touch, but I had already been defaced by his hands, what did it matter if anyone else had a go too?

It was almost as trivially easy to find a man willing to pay for sex as it was to buy drugs in this city. What a fucking pleasant place I lived in, truly what the guy who founded it envisaged his legacy as being. Five minutes was all it took for a grey Mercedes to stop at the edge of the curb in front of me, the window rolling down with a whirr.

“What can I do for you?” I tried my best to sound flirty, though it probably came out more akin to a bored sales assistant.

The man inside the car, a professional looking clean-shaven guy in a dress shirt leant across the passenger seat and unlatched the door. I’d already formed my judgements – he’d have told the wife he had to work late, apologised for not being there for the kids’ bedtime but secretly feeling relieved. The spark will have disappeared from his marriage long ago, and the children are the only reason he hasn’t left, but every time he looks at them, he’s reminded of how many years he’s wasted on a failed relationship. That’s why he doesn’t come home on time, why he spends evenings crawling the red-light district for someone who might just make him feel like he’s free again, even if only for a little while.

That was my second thought, anyway. The first thing I had to decide in that second between the window rolling down and the door opening was whether I was safe. It was all relative, of course, this line of work was fraught with dangers; but at least this desperate househusband didn’t look like he was going to fuck me, then kill me and dump my body in the sea. I hoped, anyway.

I climbed into the car without another word, his hand making me flinch as it found my upper thigh before I’d even put my seat belt on. The memories of the last man to put his hand there were flooding in, the lack of chemical protection in my brain allowing them through unfiltered, and I had to focus hard not to let them make me run. I was doing this so I could get rid of them, I wanted to do this, I had the choice this time, didn’t I?

He started asking me some very personal questions as we drove - how many men had I been with, how dirty was I, all that sort of creepy stuff. It was so fucking awkward but I managed to mumble my way to the sort of responses I thought he wanted to hear, coming up with stories about how pure and innocent I was, how I just needed a man to make me feel good. I didn’t hide how uncomfortable I was, but he was completely oblivious to it. Either that or he noticed and was a pervert who liked his girls to be shit-scared, but if I’d let myself consider that possibility I would have immediately jumped out.

We stopped in a dark industrial estate, and given the couple of other cars parked up with their lights still on we weren’t entirely alone in what we were about to do. That provided slight relief that he wasn’t about to kill me, certainly not if other people were within distance of hearing me scream. And boy, was I just itching for the chance to scream after the day I’d had.

I guess it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, it was mostly how awfully sad it was that struck me. The thought of some ratty little addict desperate for drug money being the only way he could get any made my stomach sink more than the realisation that I _was_ that addict. But I was too pressed for time to moralise, the desire for the relief of a fix had become a need, and my body was no longer craving but demanding. I could feel my skin bristling with need, as though a rash was spreading all over my body, and my brain was only focusing on reminding me how good the relief would be when it came.

Although I’d thought the car journey out here answering creepy invasive questions was awkward, it was nothing compared to how fucking uncomfortable the silence on the drive back to town was. I mean, what sort of conversation are you supposed to have with someone who’s just been balls deep in you for fifty quid? ‘Oh hey, I hear it’s going to rain tomorrow. Make sure you take an umbrella, and also I was completely faking it back there because you’ve clearly never given a woman an orgasm in your life.’ I wasn’t even sure if I should thank him when I got out or wish him well for the rest of his night of going back home full of shame. In the end, I just nodded silently and prayed that I’d never need to do that again.

Now I had the money I needed, all that remained was for me to find someone who would take it. I knew the Horde had several people operating in the town centre at night, but I didn’t particularly want to risk seeing someone who knew me. Even if they were just acquaintances I’d maybe talked to a couple of times, Lonnie seemed to know everyone in the gang, and word of what I was doing would get back to her. If she found out I was buying heroin, that would only prove that she was right to suspect me and would ruin any hope I had of getting back home.

It was thankfully not too difficult to find another dealer. Despite what Hordak would have claimed, the Horde wasn’t the only outfit in town when it came to drugs. He looked to give the impression that he was all-powerful and ran the entire criminal underworld of Etheria, but the reality was that he was nothing special. There were a couple of areas he had run the competition out of – Lonnie’s estate, for example – but in the very centre of town, the Horde was merely a face in the crowd.

For the money I had, I was able to buy enough to keep me going for the night, as well as a couple of needles and a lighter. The fact that I had to beg him for those only hit home how little I’d been left with, and how much of my life had been left behind in Lonnie’s apartment. But I wasn’t going to let that shame get in the way of getting what I needed. My body was desperate, my heart thumping in my chest like it was about to explode and my head fogged with craving. I needed the calmness and peace more than ever.

The town centre was still fairly busy, and I needed somewhere I could sit down in private to make life better for myself. I’d never have gotten past the bouncers of any of the clubs, certainly not in my hastily-dressed, shoeless state, so they were out. I could have sat down on one of the benches along the riverside, but that was far too public and would have been a guaranteed way to get myself arrested. That may have given me a bed for the night, but it would have been one where my stuff was confiscated and I really fucking needed a fix after the day I’d had.

Now desperate for the peace that the drugs in my pocket would bring, I found a public toilet that was still open and headed straight for it. I kicked open the door to the first cubicle and sat down, my body already preparing itself for the euphoria awaiting it. The lock was broken, which was fucking typical when I needed a bit of privacy, but I could no longer wait while I found a more secure place – I needed this now. With my foot outstretched to provide a little bit of resistance should anyone try to open the door, I unpacked the little bag I’d been given and started preparing, a difficult task given how much my hands were shaking. Once I was ready, the relief began flowing before I’d even put the needle in. So much relief, in fact, that I didn’t hear anyone come in.

The door to the cubicle opened, my eyes locking with those of a twentysomething woman dressed up for a night on the town. While my gaze darted around to her faux fur coat, her incredibly short skirt and the kitten-heeled boots, hers inevitably became fixed on the needle sticking out of my arm.

“OH MY GOD!” she screamed, darting backwards and pulling the door closed as much as she could from the outside. I slid forward on the toilet seat and closed it with my foot once more, the shame of being discovered rapidly giving way to the euphoria of the drugs working their way into my brain.

“What is it, babe?” a second woman’s voice came from just outside, also slightly panicked.

“Some smackhead in the cubicle. I literally just watched her shoot up.”

The second woman sighed dramatically, “Again? God, they’re everywhere these days. I swear this town is going to shit.”

“At least this one wasn’t begging me for drug money. You can’t walk anywhere without some skanky tramp asking you for 50p. Sometimes I just wanna say ‘here’s ten quid, go overdose and then you won’t have to bother me again’.”

I had to listen to the two of them talk about me like I was some kind of vermin for several minutes. The high I was experiencing meant it didn’t hurt as much as it could have done, but there was something awful about people discussing how you, and those like you, were a blight on the landscape who should be carted away and either locked up or left to die. Neither of them knew what I’d been through, all the shit that had brought me to this manky public toilet at midnight, nor what it was like to need a drug to keep yourself sane and stop horrifying thoughts and flashbacks from destroying you. They didn’t have a fucking clue how hard my life was.

Once they had left, I gave it a couple of minutes before moving lest I see them again. I’d hoped that I might have been able to spend the night in that cubicle, but the lack of security would likely have proven an issue again. Besides, it probably wasn’t that clean either and I didn’t want to wake up in the morning with someone’s shit smeared down my face. With nowhere else to stay, I looked for the nearest sheltered spot that looked reasonably comfortable to try and sleep on. I didn’t have the energy to walk far, so I was grateful to find a vacant shop front a few minutes later. It wasn’t the nicest place to sleep, but I had little choice and my limbs were becoming heavy from a mix of exhaustion and the relaxation the heroin provided.

I made myself as comfortable as I could, thankful again that it was the height of summer and not freezing cold. Even so, there was a slight chill in the air that easily penetrated the thin shirt I was wearing and I had to wrap my arms around myself to keep from shivering. It was hardly the future I’d dreamed off when I left home 9 months ago – I was cold, alone and I’d been left with nothing. I prayed that Lonnie would realise she had over-reacted and let me back in, but I’d seen the way she looked at me, heard the hurtful things she’d said. I wanted happiness, and I’d found it in her and then I’d lost it through my own actions. As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I could only hope that I’d one day find that happiness elsewhere and that this wouldn’t be the end for me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Catra finds a home, of sorts


	9. Kylie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a night on the streets, Catra meets someone who gives her a home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of respite from the ultra-sad stuff, but it's not exactly happy times all round. 
> 
> Warnings in this one are for drug use, suicidal thoughts and general Mrs Weaver abuse

“Hey, dude, look at this one! She looks all fucked up.”

A voice came through the haze of my half-conscious mind, providing a stark wake-up call. For a few seconds I wondered why my room was so noisy and so cold, as though Lonnie had opened the window wide and invited a bunch of people in while I slept. My bed felt a lot harder than usual too, and I quickly realised why. It all came flooding back in a painful burst – the argument with Lonnie, the horrible things she’d said, the man in the car and the doorway that I had made my bed.

I begrudgingly opened my eyes, a heavy headache and nauseous feeling making even that task difficult, seeing the inquisitive eye of a teenage boy looking at me like a zoo animal. He was joined by another couple of kids on bikes, the type of people that 15-year-old me would have hung out with – and that was not good news. I knew what they were like.

“Oh shit, she’s awake,” the first boy, some scally sporting a shaved head and a poor attempt at growing a beard, said to them. He turned his attention back to me, a glint of malice in his eye, “Are you a hobo?”

I struggled into a sitting position, groaning with the effort it took to move my limbs, “What?”

“Oh my god, you talk! Say something else, hobo!”

“The fuck?” I was in no frame of mind to start playing stupid games with a bunch of bored teenagers, “Fuck off.”

I felt something small hit the side of my face at high speed, leaving a stinging pain at the site of its impact. The missile, a small stone, landed on my leg and I picked it up, inspecting it and realising that it had come from one of the other kids behind. All three of them laughed derisively at me, and I just wanted to disappear; I’d gone from self-respecting young woman to victim of teenage bullies in less than 24 hours.

“Shot! My turn,” the other kid on the bike dismounted, searching the floor around him for something to throw at me, “Watch me get her between the eyes! Hobo!”

His aim was off, thankfully, as the stone, slightly larger than the first, bounced off my shoulder and hit the door behind me. I knew I had to move, that I couldn’t sit here being pelted with whatever they could find to throw at me, but my legs weren’t listening to any requests to move. I felt like absolute shit, my head pounding, my mouth dry and my heart thumping as though trying to escape my chest. No matter how much I wanted, or even needed, to get away from them, my body simply couldn’t do it.

My torment continued for several minutes, the three of them laughing and insulting me the whole time, before I heard another voice yelling, “Hey! Leave her alone!”

“Shit, it’s her hobo friend! Go!” the boy who had been next to me shot off, panic in his voice. The others quickly picked their bikes from the floor and sprinted after him.

A shadow appeared over me a few moments after, “You okay?”

I gazed upward at my saviour, who was not at all what I expected. She was an older woman, probably in her forties if I were to guess, with dark, slightly greying hair down to her shoulders. A sweat-stained white tank top was all she wore on her top half, with a dark blue hoodie tied around her waist and black trousers below. She wasn’t exactly the healthiest or cleanest looking of people, her face wore all the hallmark signs of prolonged drug use and gave the impression she was a down-on-her-luck addict. Like I was now as well, I supposed.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, grateful for the rescue, although somewhat irritated at myself that I’d needed it at all. I should have been able to defend myself against a bunch of fucking children.

“Have you got anywhere safer to go?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? I wondered if Lonnie might have calmed down from the night before, that she may have felt guilty about throwing me out onto the street with nothing and would welcome me back with an apology. But the reality of our argument remained in my mind – the look in her eyes, the way she dragged me across the floor and her venomous parting words. It wasn’t just a disagreement over who had washed the dishes more, I had stolen from her, lied to her... and by making her short on the money she owed to Hordak, I had maybe subjected her to worse.

I wanted to put on a mask with this woman, keep her at arm’s length with the aggression that had served me well for years, but I couldn’t. Why I started crying instead, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was realising the hopelessness of my situation, that I had lost the one thing that symbolised my freedom, my escape from years of abuse. And worse, it was entirely my own fault.

Faced with a teenage girl who’d clearly spent a night on the street suddenly bursting into tears, the woman sat down next to me and placed an arm around my shoulder. I couldn’t help but lean in towards her, savouring the contact of someone who didn’t utterly hate me.

“I’ve got you,” she whispered comfortingly into the top of my head, “I know somewhere you can stay.”

My tear-stained face glanced upwards, “Really?”

“It’s not much but it’s a roof,” she ran her fingers down my arm, stopping to investigate each mark that blemished the skin. It wasn’t too difficult to work out at least part of the reason why I was on the street, and I prepared myself for the judgment. But it didn’t come, “And I think you’ll find what you need there.”

“Thank you, er... I don’t know your name.”

“I’m Kylie. And you are?”

This kind of warmth was unfamiliar to me to say the least, and bitter experience had told me not to trust it. But with this stranger being the only dry land in the ocean of desperation I’d found myself in, what did I have to lose by accepting? I was far from certain I was making the right choice, but I bit my lip and forced a smile, “Catra. My name’s Catra.”

She stood and helped me to my feet. A night of being propped up against a glass door and concrete floor, not to mention the effects of the drugs, meant that my muscles ached and I was initially quite unsteady. But a few tentative steps helped me stretch out my legs and get my balance, and I left the site of my one night on the street behind.

Kylie led me through the streets of the town centre and out towards the western suburbs, an area I wasn’t that familiar with. She, by contrast, seemed to know every corner of the place intimately, guiding me through quiet side streets and little alleyways without once breaking her stride. Eventually we arrived in front of a run-down looking house, the mattresses piled up in the garden and boarded-up windows the only external differentiator from the other houses in the terrace. It was also an indication of what I was about to find inside.

Most people would have termed it a ‘crack den’ but that would have been generous. The front door had a hole gouged from it where the lock must have been, and it opened with a simple push into a bare-floored hallway with ripped wallpaper in ribbons at the base of the walls. A layer of grime covered every surface, no doubt hiding all manner of easily catchable diseases, and equally filthy wires trailed from a small cupboard into each room. And just to really round off the squalor, a scruffy guy sat propped up against the wall, his head slowly falling forward and jerking back up when he noticed. This was far from ideal, but it was at least shelter.

It was scary how quickly I adjusted to life there over the next few weeks. Unlike at Lonnie’s, I didn’t have to hide my drug use, and it was trivially easy to get hold of them. They didn’t come free, nothing in this life did, but I found it much more comfortable selling myself the second time around. It helped that I found customers who were actually nice people, not creepy, awkward businessmen trying to get off amid their shame. That, combined with a small allowance from the government that was designed to help me adjust to life outside of care, was enough to allow me to constantly be in the state of happiness that the drugs afforded me. The world was forever beautiful; what happened with Prime and with Lonnie was a mere distant memory that would no longer get me down.

I learnt how everything worked pretty rapidly too. It wasn’t quite as regimented as life in the Horde, but every couple of days some guy would come round and sell to everyone living there. We must have been a real money-spinner for him; there were usually a good six or seven of us crashing there, although aside from Kylie most people came and went as they pleased. Sometimes people would be gone for a few days and then return, others I would never see again. I liked to assume they’d found somewhere better, but the reality was likely much more depressing.

Kyle brought my stuff back from Lonnie’s a few days into my stay there, and while I welcomed having it back, I wasn’t too enthused with the way he judged me. “Whoa, this is bad,” he’d said, looking around at the seediness of my new home. He’d also offered to talk to Lonnie, ‘extend an olive branch’ as he put it, although I knew this would probably just be an excuse for them to laugh at how far I’d fallen rather than an impassioned plea to take me back.

The room I’d been given was just as crap as everything else here. A dirty old mattress on the floor became my bed, and a broken office chair and rickety chest of drawers were the only other furniture I had. It was always cold, thanks to the crumbling windows letting a draft in, and the wall around them was covered in black mold that you could even smell from the hallway outside. My one modern comfort was the one power socket that didn’t have what I assumed were live wires sticking out, where I could charge my phone.

The only other visitor to my hovel other than Kyle was Sammie. When I finally got my phone back, she’d left me about twenty missed calls, and I naturally went into a panic – I knew what she had to deal with on a daily basis, and I could only imagine what would happen if it went too far. Thankfully she was relatively unharmed when I phoned back, but I could hear a sadness in her voice, like she had lost the little spark that made her _her._ It hurt to hear, and I guess we both had a lot to say to each other too, so I invited her over that night just so we could spend some time together.

I was slumped on the chair in my room, my veins happily pumping a fresh dose of relief when she turned up, appearing in the living room doorway. My panicked hiding of the needle wasn’t quite stealthy enough, however, and my shame-filled eyes locked with hers.

“Jesus, Catra…”

“Sammie, uh, hey,” I cleared my throat, wondering if I’d maybe been desensitised to my own situation, “It’s good to see you.”

She slowly walked over to join me, looking around at the run-down room with disgust as she did, “So you live here now? It’s… I’m not gonna lie, Catra, it’s awful.”

“Yeah, well,” I scoffed, “Lonnie kicked me out and it’s not like I’ve anywhere else to go.”

“I know, but this? I’m… I worried about you.”

I felt guilty at that. I knew she had so much to deal with – her final year of school starting, the general trials and tribulations of being a teenage girl, and living with Mrs Weaver was already more than anyone should have to worry about. The fact that I was adding to it, that I was causing only more distress to her, tore at my heart.

“I’m fine, this is only a temporary thing,” that was a massive lie, I hadn’t given any thought to my future, but I wanted to at least try and reassure her, “I’ll be somewhere better soon.”

“It’s not just where you’re living,” she picked up my forearm as if to demonstrate what she was referring to, “You can’t do this to yourself, Catra – you’re all I’ve got. What if… what if I lost you too?”

“You won’t.”

Sammie squeezed my arm, and I could see tears beginning to form in the corners of her eyes, “I… you’re the only thing keeping me going right now. _Please_. I can’t handle everything and worrying about you is just…”

“What do you mean?” I could tell she was being deliberately vague, and I knew her well enough to know when she was hiding something big. It didn’t take a genius to work out who was causing it, “What has she done now?”

There was a moment of silence as Sammie wiped another tear away, and I gave her the space to collect her thoughts into something coherent. I’d seen the worst side of Mrs Weaver, but Sammie had always been a bit more insulated from her. This was largely because I was a little shit, not that it justified any of the crap she did, but I had always borne the brunt of her violence. Maybe, on some level, I thought I was protecting the other kids there; now I’d gone, they’d lost that protection.

“It’s nothing… well, not nothing, but…” her stumbling over her words only told me that she was trying to hide it. I gave her my best ‘go on…’ look, “She’s getting worse, okay? I get yelled at constantly just for existing, I get smacked around for any tiny little infraction and I didn’t even get any food last night because I spent thirty seconds finishing my homework rather than coming at the moment she called us to dinner. I can’t handle it any more Catra, I need a break, I want…”

The way she spoke felt laden with hidden meaning, and it chilled me, “You want what?”

“I want to die,” she replied quietly, and my stomach sank. That someone so brilliant, so full of positivity and life, could be brought to a place where she didn’t want to go on was as sad as it was angering. I hated Weaver, hated what she’d done to me and what she was now doing to Sammie, but I felt powerless. What could someone like me even do about it? All I knew how to do was to run from my feelings and my history with drugs.

But maybe that was what she needed to do too. I knew what she thought about drugs, particularly those that had already doomed her to the last 8 years in a horrible children’s home, but her judgement was clouded by what happened to her parents. This could help her get through the difficult times, I was sure of it, just like you’d take a painkiller for a headache when you had the flu – it didn’t fix the cause, but it helped you through the hard times until things were better. I could be responsible for her, I could supervise her, and she could get the temporary relief she needed.

“I can make it better,” I turned slightly to look her directly in the eye, making my determination clear, “I’ll make it all go away, just for a night.”

I saw a flicker of relief make its way across her face, quickly followed by one of disgust as she realised what I mean, “Catra, no. I know what you’re thinking and I can’t.”

“Please, Sammie! I promise you I can help. I… I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you, and I swear you will feel better after. Just think about it, okay? I don’t have anything more tonight, but tomorrow I will and if you change your mind…”

“I don’t know,” from her expression I’d given her yet another thing to worry about, but I knew I had given her a way out from all that worry too. She just had to let me take care of her for once, “I don’t want to end up like…”

I swiftly interrupted before she could speak of her parents, a painful subject for either of us to hear about, “You won’t, I will look after you. Nothing bad will happen, you’ll just feel really nice for a bit and you won’t care about any of the shit at home. You won’t even feel like crap in the morning, I promise.”

“Catra...”

I didn’t want to force the issue, but I was certain that I could make it better, more certain that I’d ever been about anything. There was a reason I’d been so happy recently after everything that had happened and if I could share even a little of that, just a tiny speck of happiness for her to benefit from, it would be worthwhile. It might even have been a duty – as her big sister, it was up to me to look after her, and this was how I could.

“Please. Just think about it. For me?”

Sammie shuffled awkwardly, and I swore I could feel her shiver as memories of losing her parents reared up again in her consciousness, “Can we talk about something else? I didn’t come here for...for _that._ ”

If I could just get through to her about this, she would see that I only had her best interest at heart. I knew what it was like to be at the mercy of Mrs Weaver, and I equally knew what it was like to be able to forget about all of that, and how much of a relief it would be to her. But equally, I didn’t want her to feel like she had been backed into a corner and despite how crap everything was when I wasn’t under the influence, I still wanted to spend time with her, so I dropped all talk of drugs.

As our conversation turned to lighter things, I could tell Sammie was beginning to enjoy herself and it was almost like old times in our rooms at the home. I say almost, because I could see the fear every time she looked at me, hiding behind the smiles. Part of me wondered if she didn’t trust me, if she had already written me off, but I reminded myself that she wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be laughing and joking with me, if she didn’t think I was worth it. And when the evening drew to an end, when she had to return home and I was already losing alertness, I had the warmest feeling of hope inside. If Sammie wanted to be here with me, then I was someone worth spending time with and I needed to remind myself of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you were wondering, yes, Kylie is "Crimson Waste Kyle".
> 
> Next time: It's a day Catra will never be able to forget


	10. One Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A night spent with Sammie has a devastating result for Catra

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We continue headlong into everything falling apart for Catra - because there's no such thing as too much sadness :D
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter (may contain spoilers - although anyone who's read the main series will know what happens here): Drug use, references to physical abuse, death, implied suicide

“I’ll do it.”

I hadn’t expected to hear Sammie barge into the house the following evening and greet me with such determination. In fact, the more I’d thought about our conversation the night before, the more I’d worried I had pressured her into doing something she didn’t want to. I should have known that taking drugs was a difficult topic for her, and that all I’d likely done was remind her of her parents, but I still selfishly kept on at her. So it was very much a surprise to find her stood, one hand on the flaking paint of the doorway and a look of unwavering resolution on her face. Her tear-stained face.

“Did something happen?” I saw something new in the way she came across. Not quite anger, not quite fear, but it was a strong emotion nonetheless, “Did she do something?”

Sammie’s stare remained static and intense, “I said I’m doing this. Does it matter why?”

“I just want to know what changed your mind.”

“You want to know?” she raised her voice, annoyed, then took a deep breath and lifted her shirt up, revealing a large purple bruise across her stomach, “That’s why!”

Anger seethed through me. I wanted to march down to the children’s home and smack Weaver in the face for what she’d done, punch her over and over until she fell to the floor then hold her by her throat until she apologised. How dare she touch Sammie, _how_ _fucking dare she._ I felt swamped by the desire to get revenge, to do what I should have done years ago, but I had to bite my tongue and concentrate on the person stood in front of me. She wasn’t here to get me to fight Mrs Weaver, she was here to find some respite from the hell of her life, just as I was.

But I couldn’t let it slide that simply, “I swear to God I’m going to kill that woman, Sammie.”

“Catra... Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” she closed her eyes, taking more long breaths to calm herself, much as I should have done too. When she spoke again, she was a lot more unaffected, detached even, “You said you could help me forget it all. I want to forget it all.”

I didn’t exactly need asking twice when it came to chemical happiness. My entire life was now spent either in the pleasant haze of drugs, taking them or fucking people for money to get them, and I’d never felt better. All of the shit that had happened to me would have been the end of someone lesser, the sheer horror of my life would have driven others to depression, but me? I found a way to live, to stop worrying about the past and to at least give me a platform to move forward from. Sure, my life wasn’t in the best shape, but I was just giving myself time to reorganise and work out where to go from here.

Now I was well-accustomed to taking heroin, I could share my knowledge with Sammie. I wasn’t some kind of careless junkie, though, just giving her drugs and a needle and wishing her good luck, I was going to ensure she was okay. I was going to take care of her. Even the amount I took the first time would have been too much, so I made sure to measure out just the right amount to have a positive effect without causing any harm. I helped her prepare it, keeping the closest eye on everything she did so that there would be no mistakes that could hurt her, and then showed her the best place to inject it, even holding her hand as she did so.

“How do you feel?” I asked a couple of minutes later, hoping that it would have had time to start flowing around her body and that she’d see that it wasn’t all bad.

Sammie leaned back against the chair she was sat on and sighed, “I think… I think it’s helping.”

“Enjoy it,” I was genuinely relieved that I’d been able to help take away her pain. Leaving her with Mrs Weaver was the only regret I had about running away from the home, and it killed me inside to know that she had taken the brunt of the old woman’s rage at my escape. It was almost a responsibility to give Sammie the chance to forget it all for just a few hours, a form of atonement for my leaving.

Once I had assured myself that she wasn’t having any bad reaction to the drugs, I was able to get my fix too. It was a beautifully familiar feeling as always, the calm that enveloped my body and made life perfect, and was made even better with the knowledge that my best friend – my sister, even – was here with me enjoying that same bliss. I felt it touch every inch of my body with happiness, and it relaxed me to the point that I began to drift in and out of sleep. I could hear people shuffling in and out of the house, as well as some music channel playing quietly on the ancient TV in the corner of the room, but it was more dreamlike than reality. My body had become one with the mattress I was laid on, I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began, and reflections of the lights of passing cars in the windows flashed past my eyes like some kind of ethereal spirits. Consciousness mixed with unconsciousness, as it often did for me these days, combining the two in a beautiful surrealness that lasted into the early hours.

“Catra?” Sammie’s voice was quiet, though it pierced my sleep and brought me back to reality. I tried to turn my head to look at her, but the muscles in my neck refused to take any orders and I remained staring at the ceiling.

“Mh?”

“Thank you.”

I smiled; the knowledge that I’d really helped her and given her temporary sanctuary from her life was all I’d wanted, “Sure. Any time.”

“No…” she drew a sharp breath and groaned as though in pain, even though she couldn’t have been anything but blissfully happy right now, “Thank you for everything.”

“Sure,” my head became heavy once again, falling forward to drag the rest of me to sleep. As I drifted off, I let my mind run free with the idea that we could do this again, that now Sammie had found the secret to my happiness that she would want to join me another time too. Of course, I’d be responsible enough not to let her get addicted, but the two of us having a break from reality every once in a while would have been exactly what we needed.

Daylight was trying its best to stream through the gaps in the grimy blue curtains that covered the windows when I awoke again, refreshed from my night’s sleep. The serenity of the morning gave way to a slight panic as I realised Sammie should probably have left by now, Mrs Weaver would probably be going spare if she wasn’t back by 9am – that was our ‘sleepover curfew’, but as with most of her rules, it was completely arbitrary and merely another way to control our lives. Even so, I didn’t particularly want Sammie to have to face the wrath that arriving back even a minute late would have generated.

I grunted as I sat upright, my body creaking like that of someone twice my age and tried to gently talk her awake, “Sammie, get up, it’s like… half eight.”

There was no response, so I called over again, this time a little louder but she still remained asleep. It wasn’t surprising really; she must have been so tired having to deal with Mrs Weaver constantly. With a little difficulty, I shuffled my feet around off the edge of the mattress and tried to stand, but my still-unconscious legs gave way the moment I tried to put any weight on them. I wouldn’t let that stop me though, I knew the penalty that awaited her if she stayed here much longer, and I couldn’t let her go through that. I must have been a rather sorry sight, crawling across the mess of empty plastic bags and discarded plates of food on the floor, but responsibility meant more to me than image at that moment.

“Hey, Sammie,” I pulled myself up on the arm of the chair she'd fallen asleep in and nudged her shoulder. The moment I touched her, something felt wrong about the way her body fell against the back of the chair, almost like I was trying to wake a doll. A jolt of terror ran through my body, and I brought my hand up to her face in the hope that it would disprove my fear, that my worries about something being amiss were totally unfounded.

My world stopped.

Her cheek felt like ice, and it felt like the floor fell from underneath me with every nanosecond my hand felt the cold of her face. I couldn’t move, I was static there on the floor beside her until the panic broke through and sent me into a desperate search for life. But wherever I tried to seek reassurance, wherever I looked for a sign of life, I found none – her chest didn’t rise and fall as it should, and I could feel no breath leaving her lips.

“Sammie, please… no…” tears began to stream down my face as I frantically prayed for anything that would tell me this wasn’t happening. A tiny movement, a shred of warmth, something that could divert the path of my thoughts from the inevitable conclusion. Anything that would mean I didn’t have to face the reality that was rapidly dawning on me.

I reached down for her hand, and though my own found it, it also discovered something that made me gasp audibly. There were several empty bags wedged between her thigh and the side of the chair, the type that the drugs had been delivered in, and my heart felt as though it had fallen out of my body. The part of my brain that tried to rationalise what was happening, that tried to find alternative explanations, was instantly drowned out by the part that had already reached a terrifying realisation: she had taken far too much, more than I’d given her, and it had killed her.

“No...” remorse spiralled through my thoughts, and knowing that I had been so occupied with numbing my own pain that I completely ignored hers began to hurt. I thought back to what she’d told me a couple of nights before, that she wanted to die, and how the only thing I had done was give her access to a way of making that happen. I should have taken her more seriously; I should have looked after her better and not have distracted myself with my own drugs. How could I have let her down so badly?

My panicked thoughts soon turned to what to do next. I had no idea what the procedure was for anything like this – did I call an ambulance? The police? A funeral home? Should I find help from the people here? I picked up my phone and before I realised what I was doing, Lonnie’s name was on the screen.

“What the fuck do you want, Catra?” I wasn’t surprised by her response. It was the first time I’d spoken to her since she kicked me out, and I didn’t expect her anger to have lessened any; it clearly hadn't.

“I... I didn’t know who else to call. Sammie’s dead,” the words didn’t feel real as they tumbled from my mouth. Nothing about the situation, frankly, felt real.

There was silence on the line for a few moments before Lonnie spoke again, “Poor kid. What’s that got to do with me?”

“I think...” I pressed my hand into my forehead, desperately hoping beyond hope that this was all some horrible dream or something, “It might be my fault.”

“The fuck? What did you do, Catra?!”

“I gave her some heroin.”

From the muffled thuds on the other end of the line, I think Lonnie dropped the phone in surprise. It was several seconds until she said anything else, “Jesus fuck, Catra. Why the hell would you do that? Were... Fucking hell, I can’t believe I’m asking you this... Were you _trying_ to kill her?”

“No, I swear! I’d never do that, never,” this was the most animated I’d been for a long time. I would never have deliberately hurt her, not in a million years, and I would never stop ensuring people knew that. But it wasn’t the time to start thinking about myself, I needed Lonnie’s help and I could only pray that she still held some tiny fraction of affection for me, “I don’t know what to do, Lonnie. I’m going to go down for this, fuck...”

She heaved a sigh, the type that usually meant she was doing something she didn’t want to, “Have you called an ambulance yet? Or the cops?”

Maybe I should have done, but Lonnie’s was the first number I thought of, “No, I... I haven’t.”

“Good. Do you still have any gear lying around?”

“Yeah...” you couldn’t move in this house for drugs or paraphernalia, and I followed Lonnie’s train of thought to the realisation that I was looking really fucking guilty right now, “Oh God...”

“Don’t move, don’t touch anything,” she sounded like she knew what to do in this situation, and in my panicked state I had no real option but to obey her instructions, “I’m going to make a call, wait until the drugs have gone before calling an ambulance.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

She hung up without giving any answer, leaving me in silence with only Sammie’s body for company. I assumed there were other people in the building, Kylie was probably in her room across the hall as usual, but I’d not heard anyone passing by on their way downstairs. If they knew what had happened...fuck, they’d want to get rid of me and never see me again. In fact, I imagined no-one would ever want to see me again – who could ever feel anything positive towards someone who would give a child drugs and not realise that she was taking too much? I was the lowest of the low and probably deserved everything that was coming my way.

Twenty regret-filled minutes passed before I heard the door opening downstairs and slamming shut. Footsteps investigated the ground floor, no doubt searching for anything that might reflect badly on me, and eventually found their way to the staircase. I opened my bedroom door slightly, allowing me to peer through the gap and check who was coming up. The moment I saw his face, framed by that same perfectly styled long blond hair from the memories I was trying to repress, I jumped back into the room, unable to stop the scream coming from my mouth. My breath quickened, panic erupting inside me, and I pressed my body against the wall furthest from the door to provide even a tiny level of protection for myself from my visitor. Protection from Hordak’s friend, Prime.

“Stay away from me!” I shrieked when he arrived in the doorway, my teeth bared and hands balled onto fists with my nails digging into my palms. My mind was aflame with that night in Hordak’s office, thoughts and emotions firing non-stop and my body telling me it was about to happen again.

“Now, now, I’m here to help...” his voice was condescending, with all the sleaze and self-importance someone who really believed his own bullshit, “Catra, wasn’t it?”

I shivered as my name left his mouth, angry that it too was being tainted by him, the one part of me that he hadn’t defiled until now. My eyes stayed fixed on him, watching for any movement that might bring him towards me, and every step he took into the room was like another, more sinister threat. I tried anxiously to bat away the vivid replay of the last time I’d seen him, but my brain steadfastly refused to listen to my silent pleas for it to stop.

“Don’t come any closer,” I warned, though with the level of fear in my voice, it wasn’t exactly the intimidating threat I wanted it to be, “What… what are you doing here? Where’s Lonnie?”

He smiled arrogantly, like a politician ‘delighted’ to be in charge of something they’ve spent their career trying to destroy, “I’m here because Hordak sent me. When there’s a mess to clean up, when the Horde’s interests are in danger of being harmed, I’m the one who gets tasked with fixing it.”

“Are… are you going to kill me?”

“Interesting…” Prime furrowed his brow theatrically, as though pretending to consider it. He moved closer, and I backed up against the wall behind me, but he still continued forward into my space, his face inches from mine. I was terrified that he would try something again, that he’d force himself upon me once more, but he simply placed a hand on my trembling cheek, “I hadn’t thought of that. You’re a clever one, Catra.”

Ugh, my name again soiled by passing through his lips. I had to get him away from me and Sammie, if only to allow me to calm down from the high state of alert he’d put me in, “Just… just do whatever you need to do and go.”

“Hand over any drugs you have, and I will do just that,” he ordered, finally stepping back with his hand outstretched and ready to take what I had, “We wouldn’t want you to get in trouble now, would we?”

“Will I get them back?”

Prime laughed an incredibly sinister chuckle as I carefully reached for the tin that I kept my stuff in, my eyes staying locked on him the entire time, and dumped it on the floor in front of him, “Oh, Catra, spoken like a true addict. Hordak is offering you a chance for freedom and all you care about is getting a fix. Although, I must say it was clear from the moment I arrived that that was your only goal in life. Like a sister to you, wasn’t she?”

“Don’t you touch her!” I saw him stepping towards Sammie and I felt rage growing at the idea that his hands, the ones that had overpowered me and forever corrupted my body, would even go near her. She was innocent, perfect, a far cry from the sordid world of drugs and sex that I had fallen into, and I wouldn’t have him take that from her, not even in death.

“Okay, okay,” he picked up the tin, giving it a cursory look through and satisfying himself that I hadn’t tried to deceive him, “I’ll leave you alone so you can call the police. But before I do, Catra, one final piece of advice: You know nothing about the Horde, do you?”

“What?”

Prime sighed, a hint of irritation entering his voice at my not having properly understood his point, “The police will no doubt be interested in the unexpected death of a teenager, and they’ll want to ask you about it. Hordak does not care what you say about what happened last night, but the second you mention his name, or the Horde… let’s just say that Sammie won’t be the only one leaving here in a body bag. You understand, don’t you?”

I nodded, understanding all too well that Hordak looked out only for himself. All this had nothing to do with protecting me from prison, or clearing my name when they looked into what had happened her – it was all about making sure that Hordak kept his operation secret and his money still flowing in. What hurt more was knowing that the sliver of hope I got from having Lonnie help me was false; all she was doing was making sure I didn’t rat her out to the cops. She didn’t even trust me to keep quiet, she just cared that she and, by extension, Hordak would be sleeping soundly in their beds tonight, undisturbed by any police sniffing around.

“Very good, Catra,” with unnecessary flourish, Prime turned on the spot, ready to make his exit, “And you should be careful, there are some horrible people about.”

My fists, already clenched tight, clamped down even harder, my nails breaking skin as I took in his words. He knew, he fucking _knew_ what he had done to me and I wanted to cave his fucking face in for that little comment. ‘Oh, there are horrible people about’, yeah, and he was by far the worst of them. But I had little time to stew in my anger at him, I had only barely stopped myself from smacking him in the face because it would only get me into more trouble. I was in enough shit as it was.

I spluttered my way through a phone call to the emergency services, finding it painfully surreal telling them that Sammie was… fuck, she was really gone. The second I ended the call, my knees crashed to the floor, phone falling on the ground beside me, and I finally began to feel the gravity of my situation. I had lost everything: I had no job, no real home and now I had nobody in the world who cared for me because the last person who gave a shit was slumped in a chair, dead. And it was my fucking fault; _I_ had given her the drugs, _I_ had shown her how to take them, _I_ had fallen asleep while she took way more than her body could handle. All I wanted was to go back in time, even just twenty-four hours, change something so that I could still have her in my life. But I couldn’t bring her back now, the one person who was always on my side, who would never give up on me, and I was more alone that I had ever been.

Flashing blue lights flickered off the walls of my room not long after, and I wasn’t surprised to see the ambulance outnumbered by police cars. The cops were first into my room, gently pulling me away from Sammie before allowing the paramedics in to attend to her. As I expected, it took them seconds to work out that she was long past any point at which they could save her and they solemnly began moving her body, taking her away to God knows where. I began to wonder briefly it that was the last time I’d ever see her face, that my last memory of her would be inseparably linked to my sadness and guilt. But as more cops swarmed into the room, any chance I had to mourn was lost to fear; I was not just the last person to see her alive, I was an addict living in a hovel that was normally crammed with drugs. It wasn’t a stretch to draw a conclusion about what had happened and who was responsible.

The whole house swarmed with cops, presumably trying to find any trace of illicit substances, but Prime had obviously done a decent job at cleaning the place out. Even so, it didn’t stop them taking one look at me and working out what my deal was – I was stick-thin and gaunt, my arms littered with tell-tale marks and dark circles around my eyes. I was a caricature, a stereotype of everything they expected an addict to be, and it was little wonder they put two and two together, asking me to hold out my hands to be cuffed.

The officer spoke robotically, parroting out the lines without really knowing what they meant, “At this moment in time you’re under arrest for manslaughter. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Now please come with me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe I'm already ten chapters in, we're halfway done!
> 
> In the next chapter: Catra fights to clear her name


	11. Questioning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time for Catra to face the music

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapter has arrived!
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: drugs, police interrogation.

For someone who was just “helping police with their enquiries”, I was feeling much more like a hindrance than a help. I’d been led downstairs and into the back of a cop car in handcuffs, then my name had apparently changed to ‘the manslaughter’ once I arrived at the station – “can you book in the manslaughter”, “take the manslaughter to cell 3”, “can we get some food for the manslaughter”. It felt rather like they’d made their mind up already about what had happened, and I was an easy target, wasn’t I? To them I was just some scared, lonely kid way out of her depth, and in all honesty, they were not wrong.

I wasn’t sure quite how long I spent alone in the holding cell, my body shaking partly from terror and partly with the need to chemically calm my racing mind. There was no clock on the wall, clearly a failure of their interior designer, so it may have been two or three hours, possibly even more when I was summoned and led into a room for questioning. I don’t know if it was designed to feel oppressive, or whether the stark reality of my situation was beginning to hit home, but I was more than a little terrified. I stared at the table in front of me, bare except for the recording equipment on one side just waiting to be fired into life. The harsh fluorescent lighting exacerbated the ache in my head, and the blank, featurelessness of the room deprived me of any way to distract myself from the tension inside me.

The click of the door opening echoed through my body, and I glanced upward to see a man and a woman entering. Had it not been for the fact that I was under arrest for manslaughter _and_ I’d woken up to my best friend dead in a chair next to me, the guy’s appearance would have sent me bursting into laughter. He looked like every embittered cop in every TV show – fifty-something but looking older, not quite balding but close enough that the greasy greying curls of his hair told me he’d not needed to visit a barber for some time, overweight enough for his doctor to start worrying for his health. I expect he’d probably smoked and drank too much in his prime and was now feeling the effects. And I was no expert on men’s tailoring but the grey suit he wore was real bargain basement stuff; I’d bet anything he thought it gave him ‘authority’ or ‘gravitas’ or any of those other bullshit words people like him aspire to. But no-one would ever have the balls to say that to his face.

As for the woman, she only rounded out the ‘cynical old detective and wide-eyed apprentice’ trope. She was much younger, late 20s maybe; in any case, young enough that she still had that sparkle in her eye that said ‘I’m here to make a difference’. Maybe she’d eventually realise what utter bullshit that was – when did a fucking cop ever make a difference to my life? I didn’t see how a ‘fun’ pink blouse and a tight ponytail could make one start now.

They took their seats across from me, the woman pressing a couple of buttons on the recorder until she had satisfied herself that it was working properly. She cleared her throat and had a moment’s thought before speaking, “It is Saturday 21st October 2017, the time is 1635. My name is Detective Inspector Karen Whitewick, I’m with Detective Sergeant Colin Barton. This is an investigation into the death of Samantha Manning. Please could you state your name for the tape?”

“Catra.”

“And your surname?”

I sighed, as I always did at that question. Thanks to my parents completely giving me up so young, I would never have been able to use their surname, even if I’d known it, which meant I was lumbered with _hers._ I fucking hated it – as soon as I could I was going to change it, but right now I had no choice but to let that name touch my lips, “Weaver.”

“And could you confirm your date of birth?” she gave me a fake smile, presumably hoping that I’d be put at ease, maybe smile back at her. She was wrong.

“28th of October 1998.”

“Right, Catra,” Barton took over from her. Let the woman do the easy part and hand over to the man for the difficult stuff – good to see feminism alive and well in the Etherian police force, “I’d like you to take us through what happened last night, please. When did Samantha arrive at the address you were staying at?”

“No comment,” if I’d learnt anything from my time in the Horde, it was that you _do_ _not_ talk to the police. Didn’t matter what it was, we’d lost enough people to know that they would try and twist anything to their advantage. Lonnie had drilled it into me from the first day – name if you absolutely had to and nothing else, even if they just seem like they’re passing the time of day with you.

He nodded slowly, as though he’d been anticipating that response. It didn’t stop him from carrying on like I’d answered, “And how did she seem when you first saw her?”

“No comment.”

“Had Samantha ever mentioned drugs to you?”

“No comment.”

“Catra…” he sighed, slightly frustratedly, and leaned forward until his face was about a foot away from mine. I knew this was some kind of intimidation tactic, that getting up into my personal space would eventually make me start talking, but all it did was tell me that he could really have done with a breath mint, “You must know, surely, that staying quiet will only increase the likelihood that you will get the blame for her death? DI Whitewick and I, we’re not here to start interrogating you or tricking you into incriminating yourself. All we want to do is help.”

Help? Fucking _help_? Did they have zero self-awareness? The time for the police to help me was sixteen years ago when I was first placed into the ‘care’ of Mrs Weaver. The time for the police to help me was the first time she put me in hospital, or the second time, or the third… The time for the fucking police to fucking help me was when I got beaten up by some rival drug gang, or when I was out living on the street with nowhere to go but that little drug den. It was too late now, and it was probably a lie anyway – they didn’t want to help, they wanted someone to blame for a kid lying in the morgue. And the real culprit, the person who was actually responsible for her death, was swanning around her upmarket six-bedroom house while a bunch of children hid in their rooms terrified of angering her with the slightest mistake.

“Please Catra,” Whitewick went for the begging approach, and it was really not a good look for her, “We can’t help you if you don’t tell us what happened. I know you two were close, and this can’t be easy, but I’m here for you.”

She tried reaching her hand out to touch mine, but I whipped it away before she could make any contact. How fucking dare she act like my friend – trying to jump in before Sammie’s body was even in the ground like she was some kind of guardian angel, showing me a light at the end of the tunnel. _I’m here for you,_ what utter bullshit; she was only here to try and make her prosecution numbers look good.

Barton sat back in his chair, now wearing one hell of smug look that I wanted to wipe off his face with my fist. Of course, I knew that wouldn’t be the best idea – the last person you want to punch is a cop in a police station – but fuck me, he was begging for it, “If you don’t want to say anything, Catra, we can just fill in the blanks. We’re not stupid, we know exactly what goes on in that house, and we know why you were there. I would assume that Samantha came over last night, excited at spending an evening with her best friend. But you just wanted to spend the night shooting up, didn’t you? Addiction’s hard, I know, you have all these people talking to you, telling you to stop and they don’t let up, do they?

"You were tired of her nagging, you just wanted her to be quiet for a little bit, maybe wake up in the morning and enjoy some time together without her harassing you to quit the drugs. So you waited until she had fallen asleep – it was a moment of madness, you weren’t thinking clearly – and injected her with heroin. You thought it was enough to give you a little bit more peace, but your drug-addled brain just didn’t realise how much you’d given her. Tragic, so very tragic, and I know you regret it. Did I get that right?”

I took a deep breath to calm myself. He was trying to get under my skin, I knew that, but it still stung, it still felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. Even the thought that I would have done anything to hurt Sammie made me sick, but I knew I couldn’t let myself show any reaction to the accusation. I wanted to scream, I wanted to cry – this whole situation was a fucking mess and I just wanted someone to hold me and tell me it would be alright. But there was no-one left who cared about me enough to do that, and all I was getting here was two dickhead cops trying to imply I murdered her.

Maybe I should have just given up, agreed with everything Barton had just said. After all, what was I trying to save myself for? Was I really that intent on heading back to that decrepit, mouldy house that was littered with half-conscious addicts and needles? Not that I was any different from any of them, I was probably going to end up another statistic mentioned at some presentation where a bunch of white men in suits agreed that they needed to do something about the ‘problem’. I’d be a catalyst for some ‘task force actioning a new outreach solution for vulnerable locals’ that would be ushered in to much fanfare and make absolutely fuck all difference. Maybe I might as well go to prison; if I were lucky, I could probably piss off someone enough to run me through with a smuggled-in knife while I’m in the shower.

But despite the allure of being stabbed by a grizzled middle-aged woman, there was still some semblance of responsibility in me, a little hope, however misguided it was, “No comment.”

We continued our little dance for another 45 minutes, both of them throwing every piece of shit they had at the wall to see if any of it stuck – wild theories about me wanting revenge, more fake smiles and ‘let us help you’s, and a whole bunch of irritated sighing – but I held my resolve. Eventually, once they had run out of accusations, they had no choice but to let me leave. I was on bail, pending further investigation, but at least I was out of that police station.

As I came into the autumnal air of the evening, the light beginning to fade, my relief turned sour. Where was I actually going? I couldn’t go back to Kylie’s, it was still a crime scene – that and I had no burning desire to be in the same room in which I’d found Sammie’s body, so I had nowhere to go. Again. I knew it was a long shot, especially after our phone call this morning, but maybe Lonnie would help me out a second time today. I sat on the concrete steps of the police station and pulled my phone out, thankful I’d turned it off and saved the battery when the cops confiscated it earlier.

_Catra, 5.43pm  
Hey, I know I’m asking a lot, but can I stay  
with you tonight? I’ve got nowhere else. Please._

If it sounded like I was begging, it was because I was. There wasn’t really any other tone to take when asking someone who hates you to do you a massive favour, and I certainly had no pride left. I wasn’t in a position to do anything but beg.

_Lonnie, 5.44pm  
You’re fucking joking right?_

_Catra, 5.44pm  
I wish. Kylie’s is kind of a crime scene  
right now, and I can’t sleep there_

_Lonnie, 5.45pm  
You should have thought about that before  
you killed a kid in it _

Much as it pained me to admit, she had a point. I had made a huge mistake the night before, and I was going to pay the price for it for the rest of my life – however short that was likely to be. I’d just hoped, and it was an incredibly vain hope, that Lonnie would take pity on someone who was going through one of the worst things she had experienced in her already shitty life. Maybe it really was too much to ask.

_Lonnie, 5.47pm  
Kyle feels sorry for you. ONE NIGHT. You’re  
out of his by 10am tomorrow, you DO NOT talk to  
him, you DO NOT ask him for anything, you DO NOT  
touch anything in his house. He’s expecting you._

I had to read that twice to convince myself I’d got it right, but the relief was palpable, every muscle in my body relaxing at the knowledge that I had somewhere, at least for tonight. Tomorrow was another matter – I knew I’d have to go back to Kylie’s eventually but being able to postpone that a little longer was invaluable.

_Catra, 5.47pm  
Oh my god, thank you so much. I’ll  
be out in the morning, promise. Thank you._

_Lonnie, 5.48pm  
Better be. If you try anything, I will be round there  
in a flash to beat the shit out of you. Don’t  
contact me again. Goodbye, Catra. _

I had no real choice but to do exactly as I was asked and hurried to Kyle’s place. He didn’t say a word to me, likely under the same threat of Lonnie kicking his ass if he did, although he did offer me a small plate of food for dinner. I was in no place to refuse – all I’d eaten that day was an ultra-basic cheese sandwich prepared by the cop shop’s presumably Michelin-starred chefs – and gratefully scarfed down a bowl of pasta bake in stony silence.

But my agreement that I wouldn’t speak a word to Kyle started becoming harder and harder to keep. It wasn’t small talk that was loosening my tongue – I didn’t care what he’d been up to or what the weather was going to be like next week – but the knowledge that he had what I needed. Oddly enough, they don’t let you take drugs at a police station, and the devastation that the last 24 hours had wrought on my mind was making my thoughts unbearable. I kept thinking about the moment I’d touched Sammie’s face and realised what had happened, it was playing over and over, taunting me with the guilt of knowing that if I hadn’t given her drugs she would still be here, that it was my fault, I killed her, I’m absolute scum who doesn’t deserve to live and I...

“Kyle, I need something,” I blurted out, desperation driving my words, “Heroin. Please.”

He looked over at me in surprise, eyes wide like I’d just woken up from a coma or something, and shuffled uneasily in his chair, “I… Catra, Lonnie said…”

“I don’t give a shit, Lonnie isn’t here!” even his mild reluctance became another obstacle to getting what I needed, and that angered me. I could barely focus on anything but how I was going to keep my thoughts at bay, how I needed the rush of calm more than ever, and every second that kept me from that was torture.

“I can’t, Catra.”

I roared with frustration, leaping from the sofa in a rage that I wasn’t in control of and practically jumping across to where he sat. I grabbed the collar of his t-shirt, pulling his face inches from mine, whilst my other hand wound back, ready to punch, “Kyle, don’t make me do this. Just give me what I need, we don’t need to tell Lonnie, do we?”

I’d never seen Kyle look quite so terrified, and the fear etched across his face sent a wave of regret through me. He was my friend, or at least until recently he was, and now I was so desperate for drugs that I was threatening him with violence – how had things deteriorated that much for me? That moment of shame was just enough for me to back off and let go of him, though not quite enough for me to apologise.

Kyle stood, still cautiously eyeing me and probably assuming I could snap at any moment, “Fine. But I shouldn’t be doing this.”

I had to be thankful for the small amount he could spare for me, even though it just barely took the edge off the chaos going on in my head. The world that it dropped me into wasn’t quite as beautiful as usual, the serenity in my veins moderated by the persistent darkness of knowing that a void had opened in my life now I had lost Sammie. Despite that, however, I still found myself succumbing to the weariness that it always created in me, and I prayed that I would not dream that night.

At least I managed to stick to the other half of what I had promised Lonnie: I left Kyle’s as soon as I had woken up and gulped down the coffee he offered me. The world I walked out into was almost mocking me with how bright and peaceful it tried to be – the warmth of the autumn sun bathed tree-lined streets in light, saving all but the most shaded areas from the chill of the wind. It was the sort of morning that would fill most people with a pleasant yearning, evoke fond memories of the summer that had passed and give them hope that the depth of winter was far in the distance.

Life around me continued, without any acknowledgement of the hell I had been through over the past day. Cars and buses skirted past the narrow pavement I walked along, taking dozens of people to places that I could only ever find myself staring at from outside. I wanted to scream at them, stop them in the middle of the road and tell them what had happened, beg them to tell me I would be fine. But they wouldn’t care, they didn’t know me or Sammie, I was just some fuck-up who had got involved with drugs and was now reaping exactly what she had sown.

It took me almost ten minutes standing outside Kylie’s before I had enough courage to go inside. A scrap of discarded police tape on the doorstep, crumpled under the careless steps of visitors, was the only clue to the previous day’s events. I could only muster a solemn nod of the head in response to Kylie’s greeting, a ‘hi Catra’ said with forced cheerfulness, and trudged up the stairs to my room, my hands shaking with nerves. Last time I was in the room...

As with the rest of the world around me, my bedroom gave no admission of the awful thing that it had played host to. My bed, the sheets in a mess from the police search, no longer looked as inviting as it once did; the idea of ever finding comfort in this space again seemed unachievable. And across the room, the chair in which Sammie had...shit, the chair in which she’d died. There was no trace of her, no scrap of memory I could cling onto to, just the empty space where she had once been matching the void in my heart.

I collapsed onto the bed, the ancient mattress providing scant resistance as my weight fell onto it. Trying to stop myself from crying was a pointless task, but even that couldn’t make me feel any less despairing, it only highlighted how alone I was now. My friends were gone, along with my hope and self-respect, and I faced an uncertain future. I needed a miracle to fix this, and I was far from sure that one would be coming.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: It's not over for Catra, not when Hordak gets involved...


	12. Consequences

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Catra gets a lot of unexpected news, and finds herself in more trouble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starting with a few BPD feels this week, but more of that later!
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: suicidal thoughts, police, police violence

Life sucked. There was literally no other way to look at it – I’d driven away everyone who cared about me, I had no job, no future, and I was facing the rest of my days in jail. All I could do was try and fight the creeping despair, the thoughts that told me I was better off dead, with ever-increasing doses of heroin. The hypocrisy of my situation wasn’t lost on me either; numbing the pain of my best friend’s death to drugs with more drugs was a shitty way to live, like I didn’t care about her at all. But I did. I fucking cared so much it _hurt_ , even thinking about her made my body want to explode with the pain of emotion. So I tried my best not to think about her, for all the good that did.

I hated having emotions, they had rarely served me well throughout my life. I’d always struggled with anger, which got me into trouble with Mrs Weaver and at school (which, in turn, got me into _more_ trouble with Mrs Weaver), but I made it work for me. I was the naughty kid, the scary one who was always spoiling for a fight – it meant that most people stayed away, and those that did get close were the same sorts as me. My friends and I were the people that your parents warned you about, and that was how I liked it.

But it was the other emotions that I found more troublesome, the ones that didn’t manifest themselves in reputation-enhancing violence. Sadness seemed to hurt me more than it hurt other people; others would be able to cheer themselves up with a funny movie or a cup of coffee with their friends, but for me it wasn’t that easy. When shit happened to me, I nosedived straight past ‘sadness’ and ‘melancholy’ and straight into ‘suicidal despair’, even for the slightest drawback. Not that I ever _would_ do anything like that, but that level of hopelessness hit me like a fucking freight train every time.

I remember one time when I was about thirteen, back in the days when I still kind of cared about trying with school. There was an English project about some book, and I’d put a shit ton of effort into it – like, I had genuinely tried my hardest to make it good rather than scramble around on the night before to pull together something that would scrape a pass. I was really fucking proud of my work, though, so when I got it back and I’d been given a D, the rug was snatched out from under my feet. I barely kept myself from crying the rest of the day at school (that would have really put a nail in the coffin of my reputation), but when I got back home, I became a mess. I shut myself in my room, hid under the covers and let the tears exhaust themselves, all the while trying (semi-seriously) to plan my own death. All for a fucking bit of schoolwork where I hadn’t got the grade I hoped for.

Love was another tricky feeling for me to navigate. I was beginning to understand that I’d never really known what love was, but I’d fucking felt it bad. That was what Lonnie was, I had come to realise; she was someone I had fallen madly in love with who had never really felt the same way about me. Though I’d had feelings for her the moment she’d showed me the slightest bit of kindness (wasn’t that how it worked for everyone?), when I moved into hers, that ballooned into near-obsession. I wanted her, I wanted to be with her forever and grow old together in some idyllic cottage after we retired from the Horde with the millions we’d made, or some shit like that. But now I’d fucked it up, and she’d made it clear how she truly felt, it was like the worst heartbreak imaginable multiplied by a thousand.

So here I was, with nothing and nobody. I mean, I had Kylie, but I wouldn’t exactly have called her a friend, she was more some woman who’d taken me in and helped me get the drugs I needed to get my brain to shut up. Even so, she was the closest thing I had to someone who even remotely gave a shit about me now that Sammie was gone. We often spent our evenings together, chatting and slowly getting off our faces, but I didn’t feel anything but complete indifference towards her. I just couldn’t let myself be put at risk again by having friends, and I simply switched off any part of me that cared.

In any case, friends would mean nothing if I went down for what happened to Sammie. I felt guilty, how could I not given what I’d done, but I knew it was an accident, one misguided decision on my part that had awful consequences. The cops, however, saw it differently, and their attitude towards me had moved from ‘we just want to help’ to ‘we’re waiting for you to slip up so we can lock you away’. But my resolve remained, mostly because I didn’t want to be labelled her killer rather from any desire to keep my freedom. Prison would be awful, but not as awful as knowing that, at least in the eyes of the law, I had deliberately killed someone who was more a sister than a friend to me.

I was in and out of the police station several times during the week that followed, each interview seeing the detective more red-faced and annoyed than the last. He knew he was running out of ways to get me to confess, and the lack of any drugs when they searched the house meant that he had no other method to put me away. But even despite that, I was sure they’d find something – fuck, they’d probably make something up – that would let them stitch me up. This certainty, an inevitability that I was soon to find myself imprisoned, meant that phone call I received one afternoon was somewhat of a surprise.

“Hello?” I answered, already knowing who it was likely to be. After all, the only calls I’d gotten that week were from the cops, and I was their favourite person, it seemed.

“Catra. It’s DS Barton from Etheria Police.”

I was about to go off on one about how he needed to stop calling, and threaten to file a complaint about harassment, but there was something in his voice that stopped me. It was a solemnity, disappointment with maybe a hint of fear, and certainly a major departure from the increasingly irate calls I had been getting from him of late.

Instead, I gave a snappy, annoyed “Yeah?”

“Hello, how are you today?” Barton sounded like he was reading from the phone book rather than engaging in a conversation with another human being. Besides, what the hell did he think my answer was going to be? What possible reason would I have not to feel like utter shit?

“My best friend is dead and you’re trying to take me down for it. How the fuck do you think I’m feeling?”

He mumbled for a moment, clearly not wanting to make any sort of comment on what I’d said, out of fear of getting another barbed remark, “I, uh, yeah, well… that was what I wanted to talk to you about. The Prosecution Service is dropping the case against you due to lack of evidence.”

“Fuck off!” I blurted out in surprise. My brain usually defaulted to swearing when I didn’t quite know how to react to something, and this was a hell of a thing for it to react to, “I mean… what? You’ve been hounding me for two fucking weeks and now you’re just giving up?”

“Yes, there’s a lack of evidence,” he repeated without a single shred of emotion or inflection in his voice, like the tenacious fucker I’d dealt with over the last week had been replaced with a robot.

“What do you mean ‘lack of evidence’?”

“There was a lack of evidence against you,” again, he sounded like a stuck record, the words almost starting to lose all meaning to me, “No case will be pursued.”

While I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth (or gift arsehole-of-a-cop, rather), I got the impression from his total personality transplant that there was something else at play here. Something really sketchy that I was terrified I’d find out about sooner or later. I muttered a few words of thanks – though why I should give that shower of bastards any gratitude after what they’d put me through, I didn’t know – and ended the call, the relief only beginning to dawn.

The investigation against me, the way I had been mentally preparing myself for imminent imprisonment and the futility of trying to do anything with my life had taken priority over everything recently. But now that threat had gone away, there was an emptiness, a space in my life that seemed to demand I make future plans. Plans for a future that overwhelmed me the moment I started to even think about it.

Thankfully, I found some distraction in my phone, which began to beep and buzz so rapidly I feared it had suddenly broken. But when it finally silenced, I was looking at a notification of 5 new messages from a number I didn’t recognise.

_+447700900200, 3.21pm  
I trust you have had a phone call from my friend Barton? _

_+447700900200, 3.21pm  
I have intervened on your behalf, and now I  
need you to do something for me._

_+447700900200, 3.21pm  
You will leave Etheria as soon as possible so  
as not to threaten my operation again_

_+447700900200, 3.22pm  
I don’t care where you go, Catra, but your  
little stunt with that girl had the cops  
looking in to people you had associated with._

_+447700900200, 3.22pm  
And when cops I can’t lean on start sniffing around my  
business, I get angry at whoever sent  
them. So get the fuck out of here and I  
won’t have to silence you. Hordak. _

Jesus, had this guy never heard that you can send multiple sentences in one text message? My phone was vibrating so damn hard I was half tempted to shove it down my pants to see if I could get off. But leaving town wasn’t particularly something that appealed to me – sure, I didn’t have much left here for me, but at least it was familiar. I knew how this shithole worked, which shops you could steal from without being caught, where to find drugs that weren’t tainted with the dangerous crap I’d heard horror stories about. And, despite everything that had happened, Etheria still had Lonnie, and my mind was still holding out for her, still obsessed with the happy ending that slipped increasingly further from my grasp with each day.

Hordak’s threats were honestly laughable. Maybe if I still had something to cling on to, some reason to fight for myself, then they might have worked. If there was anyone left in this godforsaken town who still cared about me, I would have wanted to save myself, save them, and given in to his demands. But I had lost it all, lost everyone who I mattered to, so Hordak could bring it on. If “silencing” me meant killing me, fuck it, he’d be doing me a favour. I was going nowhere.

* * *

Thankfully, I didn’t hear from Hordak again in the days following the texts. I assumed that he was all talk and didn’t have the balls to follow through on his threats. Which was hardly surprising, he was an absolute runt of a man, a weakling who let everyone else fight his battles whilst he stayed in his office and took the credit. All he could do was grunt menacingly at people and that was apparently enough to stop them decking him with a single punch – I guess it was only a matter of time though, someone would eventually have enough of him.

I didn’t exactly make the most of my freedom. I’d had the brief flicker of an idea that getting off the hook from Sammie’s death would be the catalyst for change, that it would be the moment that made me put in the effort to get out of the rut I was in. But I just wasn’t able to, the call of addiction kept me static, beholden to the drugs that I needed to block out the worst parts of my life. Most days I barely had the energy to make it to the bathroom, let alone to reinvent my life. All I knew how to do was fill my veins with heroin, and that was all I did. Day after day, night after night, I could make my regrets, my sadness, melt away and life could become bearable again.

It wasn’t as though I had much choice. If I let reality through too much, it started to hurt – like, physically hurt. The sadness inundated me with wave after wave of depression that twisted my stomach into a knot and tensed the muscles in my legs in their desperation to run towards somewhere happier. But there was nowhere. I found myself in a permanent state of nothingness, like I was a ghost doomed to haunt my own body for eternity. I couldn’t manage to ever do anything to make my life better. Glints of motivation, promises to myself and plans to change faded as quickly as they came, the easy lure of drugs stronger than the idea of trying to fix what was wrong. Each night I would lose myself into a welcome unconsciousness, promising myself that tomorrow would be the day I would begin sorting myself out. But tomorrow was never today.

Until one morning, the decision was made for me. I was having a dream where I lived on this weird magical planet, and Lonnie and I were both soldiers in some army trying to take it over. But there was this void-like thing that was devouring the entire place, just destroying everything in its path and removing it from existence. Everyone around me was acting like things were normal, and I tried my hardest to play along, laughing with Lonnie in the locker room about Kyle as though we weren’t verging on the edge of annihilation. I had this odd guilt, too, as though the whole thing was my fault.

I had managed to escape the place where we lived and was running through a forest, the border between existence and nothingness following closely on my heels. It was at once both eerily silent and screaming loudly as though the noise it made could only be heard inside my head. Then a sudden bang, a loud sound shook through my entire body and forced me awake into what my consciousness soon realised was the relative comfort of my room in Kylie’s house.

There were raised voices downstairs, angry and commanding though I couldn’t make out words. I pulled the threadbare blanket over my head, withdrawing from this world and whatever the fuck people were shouting about downstairs. It wasn’t unusual to have heated arguments in this house, disputes over money were pretty common in this dark underbelly of town, but this one seemed to involve more people than I’d seen here before. I hoped that if I stayed here and remained silent that I wouldn’t be involved in anything that could well turn nasty.

The stomp of several sets of footsteps on the staircase put paid to that. It was almost like these people, whoever they were, were looking for something, and I began to fear that something was me. It was Hordak, wasn’t it? His threats weren’t empty and now he’d sent people round to hurt me. I wouldn’t go down without a fight though; I was prepared for shit like this. Reaching down the side of the mattress, I felt around for the cold metal handle of a kitchen knife I’d stashed down there for self-defence, and gripped it tightly in my hand ready to fight when Hordak’s heavies came for me.

But as the door was kicked open, almost falling from its hinges, I realised with horror that it wasn’t Hordak who had come for me. A parade of cops rushed into the room, batons drawn and full body armour on each of them. It was a fucking terrifying way to wake up, a bunch of men with weapons yelling as they burst into your room, and I was rooted in place by fear.

“Stay where you are! Hands where I can see them!” the first one in, a man hidden under layers of Kevlar and a helmet barked.

I tried to secretly drop the knife back into its hiding place next to my bed, hoping they’d not look for anything else once they had me. There was already enough shit coming my way, and I didn’t particularly want to add what would inevitably become ‘threatening a police officer’.

“What’s in your hands?!” a chorus of yells told me I hadn’t been as surreptitious as I’d hoped, “Show me your hands!”

“Okay, okay,” my attempts to calm myself as much as them were completely fruitless. I was freaking the fuck out right now, “It’s just a knife, I’m putting it down!”

I don’t know why I thought that would make things better, as though my honesty would gain me brownie points with them. The moment they heard the word ‘knife’, I saw the brief ripple of fear cascading through every single one of them, closely followed by that little moment of victory. They had me, they knew they had me, and the two guys that had started pulling apart the drawers in the room would only find more evidence to lock me up.

The cop who had been first into my room edged towards me like he would an animal that had escaped from the zoo. He had already swapped the baton for a stun gun, gripping it tightly in his hands with the business end pointed at me, “Stand up! Make any sudden moves and I’ll tase you.”

I didn’t want to test that threat, and though I was shaking with fear, I still managed to edge myself towards the side of the mattress and stand up, keeping my hands well in view. A tense few seconds passed until the officer eventually realised I wasn’t about to attack him, lowered the taser and moved forward to cuff me. His first action, however, was to grip my wrist tightly, and my entire body reacted on impulse, unable to tell the difference between his hold and that of Mrs Weaver, an experience that had been etched into my brain multiple times. I tried to pull my arm away, but he held firm.

“Get off me! Get off me!” I yelled over and over, adrenaline shooting around my bloodstream and my mind unyielding to reason. The cop’s grasp of my wrist was like being touched by fire, an intolerable feeling which was uncontrollably forcing my body to brace for even worse pain. Images of Weaver’s vengeful face flashed across my periphery and my arms burned with the memory of the pain she had inflicted, as though they could feel it afresh. I couldn't breathe, I couldn’t stop myself from screaming, I couldn’t stop myself from fighting, I couldn’t stop anything, I couldn’t-

A pain greater than anything I had ever experienced cut through my thoughts, a stinging in my chest throwing me backwards onto the mattress behind me. My internal chaos stopped me from registering what had happened for a few seconds, until I realised I had no control of my muscles. I struggled to trace my eyeline towards the source of the pain and the thin wires sticking out from my body leading towards the stun gun the officer still held in his hand.

“I warned you,” he snarled, forcing my hands into cuffs then roughly throwing me against the wall whilst the others ransacked my room. My clothes and the few personal possessions I still had were discarded onto the floor like trash, and even the mattress that was my bed was upended to look underneath. They found the knife, no surprises there, and it wasn’t long after that they found the drugs.

For the second time in a month, I found myself under arrest, and it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to figure out why. I hadn’t bowed to Hordak’s threats and this was his way of “silencing” me – I knew he wouldn’t have the balls to kill me, now I was about to face something possibly worse than death. He had to know that putting me inside would be torture, that I would be cut adrift from the drugs and could no longer fight off my memories of the things that had happened. The things that _he_ had put me through.

“Fucking Hordak,” I said to myself, just above a whisper but apparently audibly enough to prick the ears of a young-looking cop going through a pile of my clothes.

He abandoned what he was doing and made out as though he was moving to search the windowsill next to me, “I wouldn’t mention his name again if I were you.”

 _Of course_ Hordak had people here. Of fucking course he did. I don’t know why I expected that I could just ignore him and carry on living here, spend my days in a drug induced stupor and never have to think about what he’d done to me. Every single year of my life I’d had to bend to the will of adults who never gave a shit about me, who only wanted me for what they could take, and each time I thought I had escaped that, I was cruelly brought back in line. It was all I was ever destined for, wasn’t it? Being taken advantage of by people.

Well, fuck it, I was beaten. Done. You’ve fucking won, life, I give up. I fully expected that I was going to die in prison, and that was honestly a pretty welcome outcome. There was nothing left in my life, nobody who cared about me, and the one thing that kept me from the abyss was being ripped from my grasp. All I could look forward to now was painful and hopefully deadly withdrawal; I prayed that my body would shut down without the drugs and my life would end without any effort on my part. Because I was so fucking done with it all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Always love to finish on a high note!
> 
> Next week: Catra in prison; Spinnerella turns up; and I swear there's actually going to be a tiny bit of positivity.


	13. Prison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not looking great for Catra as she finds herself imprisoned. But could there be a lifeline there for her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting some positivity at last! Just a hint, but it'll be there...
> 
> Warnings in this chapter for: suicidal thoughts, prison, self-harm

I had little say in what happened to me over the following week. My first appearance in court was a couple of days after the raid, and I’d been told there was no point in pleading anything but guilty – there was a ton of evidence against me, and a full-blown trial would only come to the same conclusion and likely result in an even longer sentence. As it stood, it took less than five minutes at the hearing for me to be given eight months in prison for possession of class A drugs and a bladed weapon. I could have fought back, said my piece and defended myself, but I didn’t see the point any longer. I just wanted everything over with – both the sentence and my life.

Prison wasn’t quite what the movies had told me, at least this one wasn’t. It was vast, at least two hundred women in the block I was in, and the block itself was one of about eight in the complex. The décor was unsurprisingly spartan – metal fencing everywhere and walls painted with 1970s chic beige – and everything around me designed with function over form. Our cells were usually open during the day to give us a little freedom of movement around the block, and the other inmates used this time to socialise, meet with lawyers or visit the library to try and better themselves so that they might stand a chance on the outside. Me, however, I just stayed on my bed.

My sudden withdrawal from the heroin was hell. By the time I’d made it here, I was already over a week since the last time I’d been able take any, and my body hated it. The days and nights had begun to blur into one, my body shivering with cold and sweating with heat at the same time, and my mind was somehow reaching through the intense pain in my head to bring out the most painful of memories. I could feel my limbs vibrating uncontrollably the whole time I was laid on my back, buzzing with the need for chemical relief, and I never once felt a single ounce of comfort. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t even focus on anything.

As the days progressed, it became marginally easier physically, but my mental state seemed to have tumbled lower than before. Quite aside from the constant flashbacks and memories of Prime, Weaver, and the way it ended with Lonnie, I was enveloped in the most horrible anxiety. Every moment I was even half-conscious was marked by the feeling that I wasn’t safe, that something really bad was going to happen. I handled it badly, usually getting angry and landing myself in trouble with the guards, but I no longer gave a shit. I just wanted to stop feeling anything bad, like I always used to, and I would literally have killed someone to do so. My only hope was that it’d be myself.

But what struck me most about this place was how little people cared. To the guards, the inmates were little more than livestock, numbers on a page to keep in line by any means necessary. We weren’t human to them; they didn’t care about us. Not that the prisoners were any better – you didn’t make friends, you formed alliances. You looked out for number one and if your allies left, finding either freedom or death, you moved on to the next person who could make life a bit less shitty, and who you cared about just as little as the one before.

I’m sure there were some fucking do-gooders who would have told me that there were some “bad eggs” and that I just needed to find one member of staff who _did_ care about me. But they would be wrong, no-one did. Who cared about me when my body’s withdrawal had me throwing up for hours and thinking I was going to die? Who cared when I collapsed on the floor of my cell and woke up without anyone ever noticing? Who fucking cared when I felt so damn hopeless that I punched the wall next to my bed until my fingers bled? No-one, that’s who.

Even when they eventually realised what a state I was in, help was minimal. I got paraded in front of a succession of bored doctors and psychiatrists, and it really wasn’t any different to the dozens of times it had happened before while I was at school. They would look at me with furrowed eyebrows, ask some inane questions about how I felt then write down my answers without any reaction, and tell me there was nothing wrong and I just needed a bit more self-control. When the report made its way back to Mrs Weaver, it was usually interpreted as ‘you need to slap her about a bit more’, but this time round it was sent to people who were just as disinterested as the doctors were.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that I was less than enthusiastic when I was told I should start engaging more. With what, I hadn’t a fucking clue – was I supposed to start talking to the other inmates and pretend I gave the slightest shit about them? Maybe ask a guard about his day and try to smile when he tells me to shut up and keep moving? The shrink who came up with all this crap didn’t have the slightest idea how prison worked; he was no different to the ones who told me I just had to pay more attention in school. Well-meaning but utter bullshit.

But life in prison was painful for more than just the way I had been left to deal with withdrawal alone. One home comfort we were afforded was a radio in the cell, a crappy little bit of plastic with tinny sound and capable of picking up about three stations. I didn’t much care about it, but the woman in the cell next to me loved hers and constantly had it blaring during the day. It wasn’t the intrusion of sound that I minded as much as the songs that played; all variations on a theme of love that stabbed me through the heart with happiness. Each track about how happy the singer was that they’d found love and how they’d never let it go seemed to be designed to personally hurt me; a glimpse of pleasure waved teasingly at my failure of a life.

The way I thought about Lonnie went through a sudden metamorphosis during the first month, too. Nothing happened to cause it – I hadn’t spoken to her for weeks – but Lonnie stopped being the perfect person I had always seen her as. She was no longer a poor, innocent creature hurt by my temper, but a cold and calculating bitch who drove me to breaking point. She was the devil incarnate, the worst person who I had ever had the misfortune of meeting. And I don’t know whether this was just my brain trying to make sense of what happened, to ease the stress of being in prison, or whether I had finally had my eyes opened to what she was really like, but the hate I had for her was so intense that it hurt.

This all-encompassing loathing took over everything for several days, infusing itself into every corner of my shitty little life. The aches in my muscles were Lonnie’s fault; she’d driven me away, abandoned me to the dependence on drugs that my body was desperately trying to overcome. The nightmares were down to her, too; Lonnie was probably trying to poison my mind. And it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if she was enjoying watching me, using the prison security cameras for her own sadistic pleasure as I went through the hardest times of my life.

Eventually, after a week or so of those slightly deluded thoughts, the intensity of the hatred began to wane, and the awareness that I had possibly allowed my brain to get carried away far beyond what reality could support brought with it guilt. Allowing myself to think those horrible things about Lonnie, things that she didn’t deserve despite what had happened, was an insult to her. I didn’t like her, sure, but I still wanted to apologise for my mind making her out to be some kind of evil mastermind who orchestrated my downfall.

A couple of months into my sentence I was pulled aside into an office and told, flatly, that I had to start making preparations for when I was released, and that I couldn’t spend days on end lying on my bed. I honestly didn’t give a shit; I was quite happy to get out of here with nowhere to go but back to the comforting embrace of addiction. But I had little choice, I presume they had quotas to fill and boxes marked ‘rehabilitation’ to tick; it certainly wasn’t out of any desire to see my life improved.

I was told that I would start immediately by attending a one-to-one meeting with a counsellor, and summarily take away to another part of the prison. The room I was shown into was half library, half doctor’s waiting room, with leaflets and posters all over exclaiming the virtues of crappy little ‘support’ groups for every tiny fucking thing anyone could have wrong with them. Oh, you got a little paper cut on your finger? The ‘I Have an Ouchie’ support group meets every Wednesday evening, there’s tea and cake. I was well beyond any of that shit, my life was unsalvageable and I didn’t need some naïve hippy telling me to do fucking yoga or whatever.

“Catra?” the lilac-haired lady sat at the table smiled at me. She had a kind face, not that I would admit that to her – it wasn’t going to get me into whatever bullshit she had to say, “My name’s Spinnerella, I run a local recovery centre with my wife and we like to come to visit people here who might benefit from our service. Take a seat, let’s chat.”

“Not interested in chatting,” I steadfastly remained on my feet, despite how unsteady my gaunt body was as it learned to cope without drugs, “I’m just here because I have to be, and it’ll get me out of here quicker.”

“What are you going to do when you leave, then?”

I let out a low growl of frustration. She wasn’t going to shut up with her happy-clappy bullshit, was she? I’d honestly had enough of people like that, pretending to help when they knew nothing about my life, “I told you I’m not talking.”

“That’s fine, Catra,” I winced as she said my name with that amount of warmth, as though she was someone who knew me, “I’ll be here when you’re ready to talk.”

_When_ I’m ready? What a fucking assumption to make, like I was being a petulant child who wouldn’t eat her dinner. How long would it take her to understand that I did not want to talk? I didn’t need to talk, it couldn’t solve anything – talking wouldn’t get me out of this place, it wouldn’t give me the drugs that my body had been violently needing for weeks now. Talking wouldn’t bring Sammie back.

“I don’t need your self-righteous bullshit, okay?” my temper, already shorter than it had ever been, began fraying, and I snapped loudly at her, “Why do you even bother? Do you just enjoy coming to see the human zoo, make you feel better about yourself to look down on us, does it?”

Spinnerella looked genuinely hurt by that, but quickly replaced her discomfort with a much more forthright tone, “I’m here to help people, here to help _you._ ”

“Oh, fuck off. You don’t know anything about me, you don’t know anything about my life, or what it feels like to have everyone kick you to the curb. I’ve got nobody, and that means _nobody_ is going to fuck me over ever again!”

“I know what it’s like,” she was still going for the cordial, empathetic approach, although I didn’t believe a word she was coming out with. I was about to shut her down, but she continued on before I could open my mouth, “I’ve been through hell, Catra. I was in the army, and some of the stuff I’ve seen…”

“Great, so you’re just some woman who wanted to shoot things.”

Spinnerella sighed, her expression becoming noticeably colder and she broke her gaze away from me and onto the dirty grey carpet on the floor, “I was a medic, I wanted to help people. And I did at first; they sent me off to Afghanistan, and I was over there for a few years, aside from a few months at home every now and again. It was about what you’d expect – a great bunch of people, and yeah, I saw injuries, treated a few gunshot wounds, but nothing horrific. They were careful, they didn’t take risks that might put them in harm’s way.”

“And? I still don’t care.”

“Then our convoy hit an IED. I was further back so I was one of the lucky ones, escaping with just a broken ankle, and I was sent home. Some of the people I was with, friends of mine, didn’t ever make it back,” it was clear that it had affected her heavily, but I still wasn’t sure what the fuck it had to do with me. She’d obviously landed on her feet eventually, found some way to come back from all that, and it was a stark contrast to where I had found myself. I didn’t have anything positive waiting for me when I got out, just the same shitty life with no-one caring whether I lived or died; not even myself.

“I expected to come back to a hero’s welcome, or at least a government that was thankful for what I had done for it. I got nothing. My family wouldn’t take me in, they’d pretty much disowned me after I told them I was gay, so I ended up living in a hostel, on a government handout that was just about enough to pay for the medication for the pain I was in. Nobody around me wanted to talk to me about what I’d seen out there, they were scared of what I might tell them, scared that it was too much to burden themselves with. They knew I’d been scarred by it all, the way I used to scream in the dark when the nightmares hit must have woken the rest of the hostel up. But nobody ever said a word to me.”

Against my better judgement, I found myself starting to have the slightest amount of sympathy for her. I was still not going to get taken in by whatever shit she was here to try and draw me into, but there was something about her story that had struck a chord. Maybe it was knowing that she’d been kicked to the curb by life, that she had found herself in a place where people thought as little of her as they do of me. Almost, anyway.

“Then something changed my life, Catra. Some _one,_ in fact,” Spinnerella’s eyes rose again, and the colour that had drained from her face moments before began to return, “I remember the day well, it’ll always be etched in my mind. It was a clear but freezing cold winter’s day and I’d had enough. I couldn’t handle the flashbacks, I never wanted to hear the screams of my friends when I closed my eyes again and… well, I was at my lowest point, I just didn’t want to go on. Life had become too much for me to handle, and I felt powerless to do anything about it. I found myself on the platform at Etheria Central station, just pacing up and down, trying to work up the courage to end it all. Then a woman came up behind me, put her hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Fancy a tea?’.”

Reluctantly, her story had hit something inside me, maybe the one caring bone I had left in my body. Or perhaps it was just the realisation that Sammie had felt the same despair before she died, and the regret I felt that I hadn’t been able to take that pain from her in a better way, “Right, so she bought you a drink and you didn’t want to die anymore?”

Spinnerella chuckled slightly, “If only. No, she just sat and talked with me for several hours, actually listening to what I had to say, even the bits that my fractured mind couldn’t say in a way that made sense. It felt so good just to finally let it all out to someone who wasn’t going to look uncomfortable and change the subject as soon as possible, you know?”

I could only wish I _did_ know. The only people I had ever been able to talk to – _properly_ talk to – were gone, and I guess I had to keep all my shit locked up in my head from now on; no-one here or anywhere I could go once I got out of prison would care in the slightest. I was just another broken kid, hardly the sort of person worth anyone’s time.

“She told me that she knew people who could help me, that she was studying to be a psychiatrist and doing a placement in a hospital,” Spinnerella carried on, ignoring the slight growl that came from me when I realised that she wasn’t going to shut up, “And she was right. She actually got me some proper help – someone to talk to, someone who said, ‘this is what’s wrong with you, this is how we fix it’.”

I couldn’t lie, that sounded like something close to heaven for me. But I’d tried all that psych shit long ago and it had yielded nothing – I didn’t have anything wrong with me, apparently, I was just a bad kid. And that just provided more ammo for Mrs Weaver, knowing that there was no excuse for my misbehaviour other than just being a little shit, and she took it personally. So, yeah, having someone tell me ‘you’ve got this weird mental disorder, that’s why everything is shit’ would have done wonders; or at least it would now, I doubt anything like that would have really stopped Weaver.

“And so,” Spinnerella glanced at her watch with a raised eyebrow, “I’d best cut a long story short. It took some hard work, but I’m okay now. And the woman who saved me, Netossa, and I have decided to help others too. We run a charity, a place where people like us can get back on our feet with proper assistance.”

“What do you mean ‘people like us’?” I cursed myself the moment I’d spoken, realising that she’d finally suckered me in. Though I’d sworn to myself I didn’t need anyone now, didn’t _want_ anyone, there was a part of me – a _tiny, tiny part_ – that craved the idea of life getting better. But the rest of me knew that was pointless, that once I got out of here, I was only destined to fail, to die in a gutter of an overdose. That was what ‘people like me’ did; we were trash, we blew through the streets, ignored by people who saw us as nothing more than confirmation of their superiority .

She leaned forward, and for a second I thought she was going to touch me. I balled my fist in readiness but relaxed again once I saw Spinnerella was definitely keeping her hands to herself, “People who have been through traumatic events. Like you, Catra; we can help you. We’ll give you somewhere to stay, we can talk through what you’ve experienced and help you find ways that you can move on. We can give you assistance to find a job or-”

“I DON’T NEED YOUR HELP!”

I hadn’t meant to yell, but she was rabbiting on about some impossible ideal that we both knew was pointless. It was as though she were deliberately torturing me with images of a life that was out of reach for me, a life that was for good people who had fallen on hard times. I wasn’t a good person, and I’d suffered almost every second I had been alive – what would it take to get her to realise that I wasn’t _worth_ saving?

My raised voice had stunned Spinnerella into silence for a few moments, although it was hardly a surprise that she started up once again. What was unexpected, however, was how softly she spoke, how much kinder and warmer than before she seemed, “What was she like? Sammie, I mean.”

“I, uh…” she’d sent me one hell of a curveball. I hadn’t expected her to even know about my past, let alone the name of my best friend whose death I was responsible for, and it bypassed my usual angry reaction. Normally I’d fly into a rage and berate people for daring to say her name, threaten them to stop talking, but my anger failed me. I don’t know if it was her soft, friendly demeanour that did it – after all, I’d only been able to talk about Sammie to cops who were trying to get me life in prison, and that was more of a fight than a conversation. But Spinnerella wasn’t here to catch me out, and whether she really cared or was just pretending to give a shit about me, I felt a strange sense of desire, like I _needed_ to talk about Sammie.

“It’s OK if you don’t want to talk about this.”

“No, I do,” I fired back instantly, “Sammie was… she was… fucking hell. Sammie was the best person I have ever known, and I don’t have a clue _why_ she bothered with me. We were completely opposite – she was a perfect student, I was a dropout. She had her future mapped out, I was lost… I still am lost.”

“You don’t need to be the same to get on well.”

Tears were already beginning to sting my eyes, “No, you don’t get it. She was going to have the most perfect life – university, great job, amazing family, all that crap. But me, I’m… I’m nothing, I’m a deadbeat hooked on heroin with no-one left. Sammie, she deserved to live, she deserved to have the future she wanted. And I feel so fucking guilty that she’s not going to have it, I… I wish I had died instead, at least nothing of value would have been lost.”

I couldn’t even look at Spinnerella after I’d just dumped my most private of feelings on her; I was certain she’d have that same expression of pity and disgust that everyone else had when they met me. _The poor woman, but she brought it upon herself,_ was what they all said, or at least some variation of it. I just kept a hand in front of my face so that I couldn’t see her false sympathy and she couldn’t see me crying.

“Here, you’ll need this,” I felt a small piece of card being pushed into the other hand, “When you get out, this is where to go.”

Still trying to hide myself, futile as that was, I let myself look at what she’d given me. It was a business card, the most basic type you can buy in bulk for a couple of quid and then about ten times that in postage. But it still gave me all the details of the place she ran – its address, a little about what they did and the names of the people who ran it. And in big type above, printed in red to stand out from the rest of the text, the name of the place.

“The Heart?”

“As the saying goes, home is where the heart is. And The Heart is where home is,” she stood up as a guard entered the room, “Ah, I guess our time is up.”

I nodded, mumbling something approaching a ‘thank you’, and prepared myself to be taken back to my cell. The guard looked just as disinterested as they always did, and it was almost too tempting to fire off a sarcastic comment, “Back to my hotel room, then.”

“No,” I got given one hell of a disapproving look, “Not yet. You have a visitor, Weaver.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can do this Catra!
> 
> Next time: A visitor throws a spanner in the works. But who could it be?

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you've enjoyed reading this, there's plenty of angst and drama to come!
> 
> Leave a comment if you like, I love reading what you think, and you can also find me on tumblr @lisshstuff and twitter @alice_hancock1


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